Dialogic Theory and Higher Education in the Internet Age

Rupert Wegerif

Jyväskylä January 16th 2013

Overview

• Dialogic?

• Dialogic education?

• Internet age?

• Dialogic education for the Internet Age

• Illustrations

Dialogic

Education for the Internet Age

Rupert Wegerif

Dialogic

Dialogic is the idea of thinking that takes the other into account without losing the self.

Dialogos = reason (logos) through and across (dia) difference.

For dialogic thinking there is always more than one way of seeing things.

Meaning ‘is like an electric spark that occurs only when two different terminals are hooked together’ (Volosinov).

For dialogic meaning is not a thing but a spark:

Dialogic requires difference within relationship

A dialogue is not an interaction of separate parts it is a “mutual envelopment” (Merleau-Ponty)

a “mutual atunement to the other” (Rommetveit)

The dialogic principle

Dialogic = holding more than one irreducibly different perspective together in tension

Dialogic

Monologic Dialogic

One voice: one truth Many voices:

Closed Open to Other

Representation Relationship

Identity Difference

Reification (outside view) Participation (inside view)

Internet Age?

How do we divide up history? Tools? Modes of

production? or modes of communication?

Morgan: stone age, bronze age etc -> idea of knowledge age.

Marx: hunter-gatherers primitive communicism, agricultural feudalism, industrial-capitalism, post-industrial communism.

Wegerif: gestures, talk, writing, (print), internet.

‘The medium is the message’.

Means of communicating shape our thinking. Mimesis or gesture or clowning is about taking on the

perspective of the others body. It is becoming the other person while remaining yourself.

Oracy arises from bodies and is situated in here and now. Affords dialogic but limited to the community of those in dialogue together.

Writing: supports reflection and cumulative science but also supports the false unsituated ideal of Truth as a representation. When combined with formal education it leads to the monologic illusion.

Socrates and the danger of writing

Socrates was an oral thinker but he lived at the time of the first great communications revolution: alphabetic writing.

He pointed out that it would lead to turning meaning into a thing – writing is a like a picture that looks good but cannot answer back. Meaning is in the relationship and not in the words.

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 which

the written word is properly no more than an image?

Writing changes the brain. Literates see words as well as 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)

Transmission of knowledge

Print image of knowledge and meaning as representations in books leads to education as transmission

Bakhtin and education

The 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).

Dialogic education is induction into participation

A brief history of communication

Mimesis and oracy are dialogic but limited in space and time – supports dialogic ethics of ‘do as you would be done by’ inside community and perpetual war of all with all outside community.

Print is one to many, centre to periphery, support empires and the idea of ‘Truth’ as single and fixed. Whoever controls the printing press or TV studio controls the message.

The Internet is different. It supports dialogue. It is a return to dialogue but at a higher level than oracy as this is dialogue unbounded by space and time.

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

Authority of truth, One-to-many

A dialogue, Peer-to-peer Participation Need to check

Participatory view of knowledge

According to the logic of the Print Age education is the transmission of true knowledge through reading the right books. The logic of the Internet Age returns us to Socrates’ original insight that intelligence lies in dialogues and not in books. The essence of Wikipedia knowledge is not the passive representation of true knowledge but the active participation in dialogues that construct knowledge.

Dialogic “space”

Dialogues have an inside and an outside – on the outside they seem located but on the inside an infinite space of possibilities opens up.

Dialogic education progresses by opening, expanding and deepening dialogic space

Not from A to B but from A to A + B

Freire, (1971). Pedagogy of the oppressed.

If it is in speaking

their word that people, by naming the world, transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which they achieve significance as human beings.

[. . .] this dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person’s ‘depositing’ ideas in another; nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be ‘consumed’ by the discussants. [. . .] It is an act of creation; it must not serve as a crafty instrument for the domination of one person by another.

Oakeshott, M. (1962). The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind

we are the inheritors, neither of an

inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.

‘…voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit,..’

Dialogic Higher Education

Both the radical Freire and the conservative Oakeshott argued for dialogue as the end or aim of Higher Education against the threat of economic models that saw education as a means to an end, the end of making money.

But their image of dialogue is face to face dialogue and this limits its scope in the age of mass global education.

What is dialogic education?

It is education for dialogue not just education through dialogue

The aim is dialogue as an end in itself – it is about asking better questions

Not student centred or teacher centred but dialogue centred

It is about finding a voice and creating meaning Engage in dialogue first, teach skills and facts when

needed (just in time) Drawing learners into participation in those dialogues

that are powerful and shape their lives.

Internet Age Dialogic Education

The Internet implies a return to dialogic education but with two changes:

It is not just verbal face to face to face dialogue but

a) Multimodal – images, videos, music are part of the dialogue

b) Centre to horizon dialogue

Think about googling anything or learning with a community – it is dialogic but dialogue with an unbounded horizon.

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

Illustration: collaborative blogging

Learning by collaborative blogging. We used an open source educational environment very similar to Faceboo. The course was set up as a group in this environment rather like a group of friends on Facebook. Each student was asked to keep a learning blog and to write something each week in response to the lecture.

They were encouraged to share links, videos and other resources.

They had to comment on at least two other blogs of students on the course each week.

The main assessment was to be their personal blogs we also assessed their comments on other blogs and in online

discussion spaces.

What did they learn? • The students interviews emphasised how much they

learnt from each other. • Comments on blogs often expressed the value of

the stimulation they received, such as: ‘Thank you . . ., you just made me think!’ They also appreciated the possibility to express their views and feel listened to.

• The evaluation of this course revealed that what students were really learning, independently of the official learning objectives, was how to learn together with others online (L2L2 – not just L2L)

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, a new global form of dialogic

Dialogic education for the Internet Age is about drawing people into collective creative intelligence, teaching L2L2, expanding the space of dialogue, and ultimately building the basis for a future global dialogic democracy

Conclusion