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Structure, behaviour and wood
Churchill said 'we shape our dwellings and afterwards our dwellings shape our lives', a sentiment echoed by McLuhan whose take on it was 'we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us'. That's the starting point for the theme for my bit of the Change11 MOOC. Ignoring the elephant in the room for the moment (because that's mostly what we do), there are big questions about the kinds of dwellings and tools should we be using and designing to help us to learn, what are the effects of our choices?
It's partly about softness and hardness. Harder technologies are constraining: learning management systems, for example, work because they deliberately limit the number of choices we have to make, performing some of the orchestration of phenomena on our behalf so that we don't have to. That's why they are relatively easy to use, at least when compared with alternatives such as adapting existing tools or building our own programs. There is a strong risk that they can therefore stifle creativity. However, constraints can also drive creativity. I was reminded of this while touring art exhibitions in Vancouver yesterday, where I saw some images that drew their form from the medium on which they were painted, using the natural whorls and knots of the wood grain to structure the picture.
As Stravinsky said, "The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution." Bradley Messer seems to have taken this message to heart and, though I do not love all of the pictures that result from that, there is no doubt that something creative has emerged from the constraints.
The trouble is, the constraints of our learning technologies are far from arbitrary and are often the result of turning soft and flexible processes observed in traditional teaching practices into something harder. This is not like the knots in the wood, where arbitrary forms can guide our creativity. This is the solidifying of history, the intentional creation of path dependencies that can entrap us in pedagogies and methods used by our forebears that may be less than perfect for our current needs. We need to think far more carefully about those constraints, not to take them as a given, to find ways of using them but not being bound by them. Or maybe we need to build our learning technologies more like wood, more organically, more arbitrarily.
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Jon Dron
Soft things, hard things and invisible elephants
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Comments
I find this to be a fascinating, thought-provoking post. I love the images of Messer's work--but I struggle a little to see the natural variations in the wood as constraints. They seem more like opportunities. Makes me wonder: Where's the line between constraint and opportunity? Some constraints are more...constraining. I also love the Stravinsky quote. I entirely agree with the second sentence of the quote; the first sentence gives me more pause. It's counter-intuitive: Are more constraints actually more freeing than fewer constraints? Maybe, psychologically, you get to a point of "oh well, this is just so limited, I might as well jump in here and see what I can make out of this small space." It's also seems to me that Stravinsky is talking about constraints one imposes on oneself (although it's a little ambiguous). Self-imposed constraint would have a different impact than constraints imposed by an outside force. I'm thinking about my students and what would give them a sense of creative license, a freedom to do something unique and individual with their work for class. I think if I could find a way for them to select and apply their own constraints, it would be more freeing than a more typical class assignment (full of teacher-constructed constraints).
- Cheryl Smith
I like the perspective of opportunities as opposed to constraints, Cheryl!
The hardest of technologies that involve a human component, such as machine operating procedures, stop creativity altogether - the results of creativity in such circumstances tend to be things like blown-up nuclear reactors and other kinds of broken machinery. Most things we do in education tend to be softer than that, though I have often sat through lessons that involved precise copying, and assessments that involve filling in the blanks. It's not a bad thing though as, on many occasions, that really is a very good way to learn. Learning a musical instrument, for instance, greatly benefits from (mindful) repetition until you get it right: only once you have taught your fingers/lungs/lips/whatever to play are you able to move on to be more creative. Similarly, once you have got that far, the 12-bar blues format can provide a framework for a wealth of creative music and it (and variations on it) forms the basis of many of the greatest songs of the past 100 years. And, of course, counterpoint, a highly mechanical and constraining musical technology, provided us with some of the most beautiful music ever written. The same is true of creating learning experiences. Despite their almost total lack of empirical foundation, when I'm lost for an idea I'll quite regularly invoke Kolb/Lewin's learning cycle or Curt Bonk's R2D2 model to give me something to kick against, for instance. They are fairly arbitrary constraints, but they can be quite helpful. All of which emphasises the big point here that it ain't what you do it's the way that you do it!