unexpected ed adventures

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.

Twitter as an Indian Train
I’m not so sure that Connectivism requires technology and perhaps it can work in other contexts.  That we have a certain amount of interrelatedness (being part of a network) may be enough on its own.  It may be that we can learn through any  f2f or online interconnectedness.  A lot of interesting learning for example I suspect occurs on a train travelling through India.  And while I have been to India, I didn’t travel on a train and these ideas of mine are thus a bit third hand.

Indian trains rarely travel on time and are usually very late. They are crowded and confusing affairs for a westerner.  But for Indians they are a huge source of learning through connectedness.  When a train stops in an Indian village, everyone comes to meet the train.  They talk and gossip with those on the train and in the process learn what is happening with friends and relatives (and probably everyone else) who is on the train or along that particular train line.  The train is the source of news but also the carrier of news.  A particular type of learning (or better described as piecing together the jigsaw of multiple conversations to understand new information).  A contextualising occurs so that new intelligences are formed from many disparate pieces of information.  I am reminded of ideas of the mind as a hologram, that within every cell of the brain, the whole mind resides (which we might extrapolate to within every individual, the knowledge of the network resides).  For those on the Indian train, one doesn’t have to hear every piece of information to know everything that goes on.  There is a process akin to inference or the mathematical principle of induction, or  where a greater whole of knowledge can be deduced from the sum of the parts.  Thus a great deal of learning occurs.

I think Twitter has created a process like an Indian Train.  There are many conversations that occur, often trivial, but which help us learn a greater whole – at least that’s how I use it.  There are those I learn directly from; but can also read into their tweets what is being learnt from (and by) those that they follow.  And thus without having to follow every link or thread I feel my learning is much greater.  Twitter can also work as a filter in that I follow people who, if something new is important enough, they will usually mention it.  I don’t feel I have to follow all the great learning gurus, though I follow some. If one of the important ones I don’t follow says or does something of importance, I’m usually going to find out through the network.

Twitter as information control
Information also (potentially) moves much faster on Twitter than via any other medium and it is interesting to see political commentators and emergency departments using it to disseminate news faster than traditional media.  I also notice that some mainstream and financial media are using Twitter.  Historically those who have control of the quickest form of information transfer, can potentially gain access to the most wealth and power.  Twitter as a business model, might be worth a lot more than we think.

Twitter and esp
I wonder if before all this if information transferal didn’t require such modern means as trains and Twitter.  And perhaps there was not even need for learning by association as Downes suggests,  for learning to occur.  In Australia it is well known that when an Aboriginal person dies, everyone else in the tribe will know, regardless of their location or physical proximity to that person.  As another example, Aboriginal elder Wanjuk Marika in his biography (Life Story, published by University of Queensland Press) describes how later in life he developed the ability to go into an unfamiliar landscape and from it learn and “know” the myths and stories of the place and its people, even if the former tribe of the area no longer existed.  And a third example – Laurens van der Post in Lost World of the Kalahari describes how all the people of the Kalahari tribe, again despite their location, immediately know when a hunting party has tracked and killed one of the much sought after Elan antelopes, their favourite food (and something of a symbolic totem).  I suspect we have lost such abilities of psychic knowing through technology – it’s easier to use a phone than remain in the semi conscious altered state that facilitates such knowing.  But perhaps we can get a glimpse of immediate learning and network knowledge through the speed of new applications like Twitter.

As an afterthought about psychic learning or ESP, I remember as a psychology student having access to the opportunity to one of the few university psychology departments in the world ( think at the time there were only 65 of them worldwide – definitely not a research priority!) which included formal study of Parapsychology as part of the curriculum.  (This was at the University of Tasmania under a brilliant teacher Dr Jurgen Keil ).  Huge research was done (I think during the 1930s) meta-analysing already established large collections of ESP events.  From memory (and I’d be happy to be corrected), one of the conclusions was that ESP events more readily occurred when an incident occurs that potentially (or actually) endangers someone to whom we are related (more commonly received by women curiously enough).  A further conclusion can then be made that learning via ESP more readily occurs because it has survival value for the tribe – if we can learn that someone close to us is endangered, we might be able to act to help save them.  However if a technology can bypass this need (or make it easier) then there is no need for ESP.  Thus over the millenia this ability has faded into the background of consciousness.

So perhaps technologies like SMS and Twitter can awaken us to this dormant form of learning?  Perhaps networked learning and intelligence exists a-priory after all and it’s my hope that the stratospheric rise in relatedness enabled by technology might mediate it’s revival to our modern consciousness.

At present I am attempting to collect thoughts on innovation, technology and e-learning and some of the hidden psychological dimensions of our thoughts and efforts in these areas.

Emphasis on resource collection at the expense of collaboration and social dimensions of e-learning may occur in contexts where there is an excess or imbalance of a number of factors. These could include (and are not limited to) excess rationality, overly masculine activities or an overly outward perspective. These activities can occur unintentionally and also have unintentional consequences. The psychological maxim of what we ignore sending roots up and growing in our front yard can apply here.

As an example, e-learning can often happen (or happen better) when social dimensions such as collaboration are included; and we have seen how the prominence and extent of online social networking, as an unwitting consequence of restriction of social dimensions.

The success of including social dimensions in e-learning can be much harder to measure and an overly rational approach to the measuring of the uptake of e-learning may hinder recognition of beneficial activity in this area and affect the quality of learning and social activity itself. In addition technology, although providing a myriad of opportunities for social relatedness, may have its own particular “separating” emphasis on our psyche. More to follow.