Openness, Freedom, Restriction and Control in Online Education
As a psychologist in online education I like to look at how various opposites or polarity functions operate and how we might adapt to and maximise awareness of a continuum to our advantage. As individuals we can reflect on a polarity such as introversion and extroversion and how we might adapt (or unconsciously change) these aspects of ourselves online. (something about which I commented here) An introvert may feel more comfortable through online anonymity or detachment to become more of an extrovert. Many of us have experienced online disinhibition effects where we might say online more than we intended face-to-face, for which we may need to bring considerable consciousness to our online behaviour.
Another polarity we can experience in our individual psychology is that between masculine and feminine dimensions of our personality or psyche. As I wrote about in a recent post , masculine and feminine energies can also gather momentum and become unbalanced in the collective psyche. Often when within a system too much logic, rationality or discrimination occurs, there can be a need for a rebalancing of feminine qualities of creativity, relatedness, and imagination. When I am visiting new online projects aimed at merely developing or modifying content I always look for and mention opportunities for creating online social connectedness for their students to balance a relatedness that may be missing.
When too much emphasis at either end of a polarity occurs in an individual or group, the opposite side can either need to or become activated to arise unexpectedly. The rapid rise of online social networking as mediated by both an over emphasis of the masculine principle in our culture; and the ability of new online media to create contexts for new relatedness. Yet these forces tend to be hidden – ten years ago would we have predicted we would be so hungry for MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter or even SMS? I don’t think so.
Endogamy and Exogamy: Collective Polarities
Endogamy and exogamy are anthropological principles that describe activity for cohesion or dispersal of a tribe (or family or group or organisation).
Endogamy encourages (or at times enforces) cohesion. We see it in activities such as encouraging families staying together, taking care of those near to us and promoting the culture of the tribe, a looking out for each other type of attitude. (It’s a bit like a cultural introversion.) Endogamy has probably been responsible for a lot of conflict over the ages, as groups (or nations) try to protect “what’s ours”. On the positive side endogamy makes the benefits of family, or a sense of inclusion or belonging, possible.
Exogamy on the other hand moves energy and activity away from closeness, the family or the tribe. So for example there are taboos that rule who you are not allowed to marry according to closeness. In our culture we cannot marry parents or siblings, whereas this differed in ancient Egyptian culture. In Australian aboriginal culture there are very specific rules about which skin groups must and must not marry. It’s also (I have heard) complex in Chinese culture where you cannot marry within up to a certain number of cousins from yourself. And so the emphasis is more away from closeness, at least to keep the gene pool healthy, but also to exchange beyond the tribes and beyond our normal horizons.
In any tribe, while the relative amounts of Endogamy and Exogamy may gradually change over time, they by and large need to be kept in a fine balance. If the family, tribe or group move too far or suddenly in one of these directions, there is a force that will move energy towards the other. C.G. Jung described endogamy and exogamy as collective instincts, and as such they are often beyond our individual control or move as a larger force that an individual cannot readily comprehend.
Some examples
If after a long period of stability in one place, a family suddenly moves away from the “homeland”, we have an example of endogamous activity. The uprooting of this family then demonstrates a balancing of exogamy. However if the move is overseas to another country then we have a more extreme form of exogamy that will then be balanced by arising exogamy. So a family group in an entirely new culture will often display a positive endogamy in the form of increased family support in various ways, and increased expression of the original culture. We have the phenomenon of “more Italian than the Italians” for example as the cohesive cultural pressure increases. This can also express negatively as an increased risk of incest, which psychologists have studied amongst migrant families.
I see endogamy in my own family history and how this impacts on the present. In the Errey family there is a history of cousins marrying each other – a very endogamous activity. (Although not “bad” as such it is something of which I’m not especially proud having the unfortunate effect of similar looks and genes.) As a consequence (or better compensation) of this endogamy, I see the following balance towards exogamy playing out in our family through our moving to Australia last century, followed by the further uprooting of my parents when as young adults from Western Australia to Melbourne; and then the move of our family to Tasmania when I was aged 14. What then happened is very interesting. Tasmania is renowned for its history of incest by white settlers (just check the index of any sociology text book), and I suspect this image or energy prompted further exogamy amongst my siblings – 2 of us live in North America and the other 2 live on the mainland. None of us have stayed in Tasmania – as if we weren’t ready for a particular level of endogamous cohesion yet, so the exogamy is still playing out.
Another example of how the forces of endogamy and exogamy might move in an individual is demonstrated in the Australian film Japanese Story. While this story has many levels of meaning it shows a dramatic compensation for too much sudden exogamy. A young Japanese businessman is sent out to Australia to check on family owned mining interests. He pushes his guide (played by Toni Collette) to take him further and further into the outback – the complete opposite of Japan with its sophisticated endogamy in the form of stability, closeness and emphasis on familiarity. Their four wheel drive vehicle gets bogged in sand and they nearly perish as people sometimes do venturing too far unpreparedly into the Australian outback. Later the two become romantically involved and as they travel into other outback areas together a tragedy occurs leading to his death and the grief that pervades the end of this film. It is as if he is not ready, culturally or psychically, for the sudden but necessary exogamy, perhaps caused by hundreds of years of Japanese, for him, cloying cultural endogamy.
So how does this relate to e-learning?
I suspect that in online education, when a move is made to open a system up through the huge freedom that technology enables, a compensation occurs in another part of the system or organisation. So for example if a particularly enlightened teacher says “lets put this course on wikispaces” (an outwardly focused, open and therefore exogamous activity) and proceeds to do so, at the same time the IT guy in the same organisation says something like “hey lets install that new Microsoft security suite and improve the security of our system” and up goes another firewall (endogamy) that possibly blocks the wiki and unintentionally discounts the original efforts – until at least a different route is taken that may bring together these opposite forces. The “system” , within which such a pushing and pulling effect might occur, can be any organised grouping of people – it could be the school we work at, a network or even an education or a national training system. It is usually unconscious and there doesn’t have to be any communication between the two parts or awareness of what the other is doing for this to occur. The current moves of our nations leaders to filter the internet might also be a similar (unconscious) reaction to the opportunities to innovate, explore, open up information and reach outwardly that the freedoms of the internet and web2.0 have until now been providing.
Story 1
Harriet Wakelam from West Coast TAFE is a good source of examples. Harriet is a wonderful example of an innovative pioneer with encouraging new technologies such as blogging. My favourite story that illustrates the tensions I am attempting to describe, is of Harriet being told by the IT department that she could only introduce blogging to her institute provided it was done in Microsoft Sharepoint. While I haven’t directly explored the possibilities of blogging in Sharepoint it seems to me an enormously restrictive offering. How did this situation come to occur and did Harriets outward focus and open attitude to online education have anything to do with this?
In talking with Harriet she thinks that it does and we went on to talk about a possible solution to this issue. Part of the answer we think it so include in our innovation planning to inform and communicate with the potential restrictive or risk averse areas of the organisation. That there is cross fertilisation and influence between the teachers and the IT staff could mediate this issue. Harriet has since told me that they have a new IT manager and that whereas previously online education and IT had operated as 2 separate little networks, now they are at least exchanging priorities. Harriet’s department now has a Linux slice and an instance of Wordpress for blogging – and the IT department has the guarantees it needs about such activity to be sustainable.
Story 2
When involved in innovative activities at Box Hill Institute I was lead into a context of immense restriction to the point that I often thought my project (implementing online counselling for students) would never get up. There were so many restrictions to consider, ethics, risk management, informed consent, concerns of psychologists, and managers at all levels. The IT department wanted minimal change to their systems. Yet by quietly persisting (and in particularly by communicating and exchanging with all the necessary (and numerous) risk averse areas of the organisation) eventually the project became a full service, for which I received much credit. Curiously from then on I was much more easily able to innovate almost without restriction. It was as if by considering all the restrictive factors an openness arrived (which was more than just trust) as the consequent compensation – endogamy moving to exogamy in a considered and manageable way.
Story 3
Al Upton from Adelaide is an illustrative example. Al’s mini-legends blogging program was halted by the South Australian Education department, to a howl of protest. This experience reminds me most of the Japanese Story analogy – where a very “out there” project gets cut short. Fortunately Al has survived and has continued to blog with his students. Al is very interesting to talk with about this experience and he has become a goldmine of legal nuance in relation to taking young pupils online and expect that his future innovations will be all the richer for what he has learned.
Story 4
I recently spoke with Terese Morgan from TAFE Queensland who gave her own wonderful example of her secondment as a teacher to run the IT department for 18 months, which has brought many lasting changes. She learned how managers saw IT with a completely different set of eyes. She was able to help them cost in the teaching element of IT changes, which had previously not been brought in early enough to engage key stakeholders. She created a new team which included an operations manager who was IT savvy and could act as an “IT interpreter” for her and who also know how to talk with the IT team. Terese has returned to her former role continues to input; and while she says some things have “slipped back” a bit, a lot of change has remained.
Resources
To its credit the Australian Flexible Learning Framework’s E-standards Experts Group has developed toolkits and technical requirements for teachers and IT staff alike to exchange and make available many of the commonly used online tools. The report Tracking the changes: A follow-up study to the 2007 computer network and firewall access has just been released. This resource creates a context for healthy innovation and development through information and tools to create conversation and action between teacher/innovators and the various parts of their organisation.
I’m hoping to collect stories of useful exchange between the innovative and outwardly focused (exogamous) and the cautious, inwardly focused (or endogamous) parts of an organisation. If you have a success story I would really appreciate if you would put it in a comment here or leave me a link.
