Letra de The Point

CONTEXTS AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 322
INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY:
CAI BEGINNINGS 324
COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND AI RESEARCH 325
KINDS OF DIGITAL MEDIA LEARNING 327
PIONEERING LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS 346
CHALLENGING QUESTIONS 351
CONCLUSION 356
REFERENCES 358

With full acknowledgement of the warning from the 1940 lecture by Virginia Woolf, this chapter begins by presenting a theory of mind, knowing only too well, that “a whole group of different” learning theorists cannot find adequate coverage under one umbrella. Nor should they. However, there is a movement occurring, a form of social activism created by the affordances of social media, an infrastructure that was built incrementally during two to three decades of hard scholarly research that brought us to this historic time and place. To honor the convergence of theories and technologies, this paper revisits the Points of Viewing Theory to provide researchers, teachers, and the public with an opportunity to discuss and perhaps change the epistemology of education from its formal structures to more Do-It-Yourself (DIY) learning environments that dig deeper and better into content knowledge. As the saying goes, we live in interesting times. Let’s not make this saying a curse. Let’s “deschool” society as Ivan Illich suggested in 1971 and design more equitable systems of learning across mediated platforms.

The Points of Viewing Theory (POV-T) is the foundation on which this chapter on computers, the Internet, social media, embodied cognition, and interactive digital media learning environments, including games for learning, is constructed. According to this theory developed by Ricki Goldman (formerly Ricki Goldman-LSegall) learners actively layer their viewpoints and their interpretations to elicit patterns, themes, and groupings of ideas that lead to a deep understanding of the content under investigation and to reach agreements—if only partial (Goldman, 2007; Goldman-Segall, 1996a, 1998a). POV-T is not limited to making meaning with from a solitary standpoint. Indeed, the purpose of applying POV-T is to enable learners to learn from one another by seeing each other’s viewpoints through perspective-taking as well as to be able to see their own changing perspectives on a subject in diverse contexts and settings. As Rowland points out: “We come to know through interpretation, dialog, and negotiation of meaning with...others, through a conversation with manipulation of the materials of a situation” (Rowland, 2004, p. 43).

The theory, first developed by Goldman in the 1990s, also strengthens content knowledge by layering the ideas of participants and stakeholders in a shared learning environment using a range of methods, tools, and “documents.” POV-T also provides a framework for finding underlying patterns that lead to agreements. Tools that make evident this theory are called perspectivity technologies because they provide a platform for multiloguing (Goldman-Segall, 1994), a place and space for building cultures or communities of practice where one “catches sight” of the other while participating in learning. Given the problematics of living in a complex global society facing enormous cultural, social, environmental, and economic differences of opinion, this theory is critical for communicating with each other and reaching what Ivan Illich calls conviviality (1973), Clifford Geertz calls commensurability (1973), and Goldman-Segall (1995) calls configurational validity—a form of thick communication, which emerges from using media tools to layer views and perspectives into agreements.

POV-T incorporates how each person at different times and contexts will understand the same content whether it is a process, event, document in any media, or action “with new eyes.” Research on what Black (2010) calls the embodied/grounded cognitive perspective takes advantage not only of our visual perceptual systems for learning, but also our entire full body perceptual systems. Recent brain scanning research has shown that many cognitive tasks that were thought to be purely symbolic actually involved a multisensory perceptual simulation. The best preparation for such task requires a fully embodied learning experience. The use of computer game-like learning environments (such as the Wii and Kinect) will continue to open the doors for exploration into how the social mind makes sense of experiences. Moreover, given the rise of social media and games for learning, as well as the recent findings on the plasticity of mental interpretations, the brain’s capacity for mental mirroring, and the intimate relationship between emotion and social intelligence that shows how minds can be reconfigured with changes to embodied experiences, the Points of Viewing Theory, a foundational theory of minds presented in this chapter, is the one that can move forward our understanding of learning with computers from the advent of early instructionist approaches to more recent constructionist and socioconstructionist applications.

In this chapter, the authors explore a range of concepts and tools that have been designed for learning. The authors expect that readers will create new configurations as they read the text. Indeed, that is the idea behind the theory—to learn from both a layering of each other’s ideas as well as from the diverse perspectives each of us, as solitary readers (if there is such a thing) can make meaning of different contexts to build knowledge, together.

CONTEXTS AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

We start by unfolding how the Points of Viewing Theory provides us with a lens from which to better connect the writings of past and present leading theorists. We do this to tease out some of the sticky webs that confuse policy makers and academicians, as well as to envision future directions. The underlying theme running through this chapter is that many routes combining a vast array of perspectives are needed to shape an educationally sound approach to learning and teaching with digital media technologies. There is no one fix, no one solution. Rather, there must be an openness to appreciate diversity and a layering of points of viewing.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the age-old debate between empiricism and idealism shifted: science could be used to not only observe the external world with microscopes and telescopes, but also to change, condition, and control behavior. Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov experimented with dogs, calling his theory conditioning. Dogs “learned” to salivate to the sound of a bell that had previously accompanied their eating, even without receiving the food. Pavlov’s theory of conditioning played a central role in inspiring John B. Watson, who is often cited as the founder of behaviorist psychology. In 1913, Watson, while continuing to work with animals, applied Pavlov’s theories to children, believing that people act according to the stimulation of their nervous system and can just as easily as dogs be conditioned to learn. A turbulent personal turn of events—leading to his dismissal from Johns Hopkins University—extended Watson’s behaviorist approach into the domain of marketing. He landed a prime job as vice-president of J. Walter Thompson, one of the largest U.S. advertising companies, and helped change the course of advertising forever (Daniels, 2000). As media, education, and business enter a convergent course in this 21st century with new tools for learning and the new knowledge industry, behaviorist theories remain a strong and silent partner y.

A leading proponent of behaviorism, Edward Thorndike, with his 1899 article on “Animal Intelligence” and subsequent book Educational Psychology in 1903, is often called the founder of the field of educational psychology. His educational psychology book made recommendations for teaching students, based on his research on animals (the Law of Effect and the Law of Exercise that establish connections between stimuli and responses). (He conducted studies with students, and not only animals, using this same basic framework.) The leading behaviorist in the educational domain, Burrhus Frederic (B.F.) Skinner, contributed the idea of operant conditioning—how positive and negative reinforcement (reward and punishment) can be used as stimuli to shape how humans respond. With this variation, the theory of behavior modification was born. All human actions are seen to be shaped (caused) by the stimulus of the external world on the body. In short, there is no reasoning mind creating reality, merely a hard-wired system that responds to what it experiences from external sources. Infamous for designing the glass “Air Crib,” which his daughter—observed, measured, and “taught” how to behave—spent time living in, Skinner not only practiced what he preached, but also led the way for even more elaborate experiments to prove how educators could shape, reinforce, and manipulate humans through repeated drills. Much of this early work resurfaced in electronic learning systems today.

What was salient in the behaviorist approach was that the proponents addressed the role of external stimuli—that our bodies send messages to the brain that can be interpreted. What was missed was selectivity of the brain in interpreting how perceptions affect not only behavior, but create new perspectives layered on both internal predispositions and previously acquired interpreted experiences. In this chapter we propose that interactions among genetics, experience, and ongoing perceptual reactions along with what is felt in the whole body and interpreted in the mind are paramount to learning.

In short, even with the advent of new man-machine studies in the post–World War II period, the role of perspectivity has been missing as a key part of the interpretive executive functioning of the brain Nevertheless, with the advent of the computer, intrepid behavioral scientists persisted in designing and using drill-and-practice methods to improve memorization tasks (e.g., Suppes, 1966). They turned to an examination of the role and efficacy of computers and technology in education, a subject understood in a behaviorist research agenda that valued measurable results and formal experimental methods, as Koschmann (1996, pp. 5–6) notes in his critique of the period. Accordingly, proponents of Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI) in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s asked how the computer (an external stimulus) affects (modifies) the individual (a hard-wired learning system). Their research questions focused on how the process of learning could be improved by using the computer.

We see these classic debates between empiricism and idealism as being connected with bifurcation and a dualistic world view. It was not possible at the time to understand how the working of the brain, a network of perceptions, could be connected with perspectives, the interpretations that people as individuals and as a society, make. In short, an embodied notion of how learning is not internally nor externally “located.” A holistic view of the world did not seem possible then, and for many scholars today, unfortunately, it still is an enigma.

An alternative approach to CAI is rooted in studying the individual mind and conducting experiments on how the mind works. The mind as a site of research (and not just idealization or speculation) has its modern roots in the work of Jean Piaget (b. 1896), a natural scientist trained in zoology but most renowned for his work as a developmental psychologist and epistemologist. After becoming disillusioned with standardized testing methodology at the Sorbonne in France, Piaget returned to Geneva in 1921 to dedicate the rest of his academic life to studying the child’s conception of time (Piaget, 1969), space (Piaget & Inhelder, 1956), number (Piaget 1952) and the world (Piaget, 1930). Although the idea that children could do things at one age that they could not do at another was not new, it was Piaget who was able to lay out a blueprint for children’s conceptual development at different stages of their lives. For example, the classic theory of conservation eludes the young child: a tall glass contains more water than a short one even if the young child pours the same water from one glass into the other. Until Piaget, no one had conducted a body of experiments asking children to think about these phenomena and then mapped the diverse views that children use to solve problems into categories. By closely observing, recording his observations, and applying these to an emerging developmental theory of mind, Piaget and his team of researchers in Geneva developed the famous hierarchy of thinking stages: sensori-motor, preoperational, concrete, and formal. Piaget did not limit all thinking into these four rigid categories but rather used them as a way to deepen discussion on how children learn.

What is fundamentally different in Piaget’s conception of mind is that unlike the behaviorist view that the external world affects the individual—a uni-directional approach with no input from the individual—the process of constructivist learning occurs in the mind of the child encountering, exploring, and theorizing about the world as the world is encountered as it moved through preset stages of life. The child’s mind assimilates new events into existing cognitive structures and the cognitive structures accommodate the new event, changing the existing structures in a continually interactive process. Schema are formed as the child assimilates new events and moves from a state of disequilibrium to equilibrium, a state only to be put back into disequilibrium every time the child meets new experiences that cannot fit the existing schema. Beers (2001) has called the assimilation/accommodation process a dialectical inter-action among person, objects of creation (artifacts), and the curricular world in which the artifacts are created.

However, Piaget also believed that learning is a spontaneous, individual cognitive process, distinct from the sort of socialized and nonspontaneous instruction one might find in formal education, and that these two are in a somewhat antagonistic relationship. Critiquing Piaget’s constructivism, the great Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky wrote: