Communication and Learning in an Age of Digital Transformation

David Kergel, Birte Heidkamp-Kergel, Ronald C. Arnett, Susan Mancino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429771996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Communication and Learning in an Age of Digital Transformation provides cross-disciplinary perspectives on digitization as social transformation and its impact on communication and learning. This work presents openness within its interpretation of the digital and its impact on learning and communication, acknowledging historical contexts and contemporary implications emerging from discourse on digitization.

The book presents a triangulation of different research perspectives. These perspectives, which range from digital resistance parks and cyber-religious questions to cultural-scientific media-theoretical reflections, point to the performative openness of the analysis. The book represents an interdisciplinary approach and opens a space for understanding the social complexity of digital transformations in teaching and learning.

This book will be of great interest to academics, post graduate students and researchers in the field of digital learning, communication and education research.

Part I

Introduction to communication and learning in an age of digital transformation

Chapter 1

Introduction and structure of the book

David Kergel, Birte Heidkamp-Kergel, Ronald C. Arnett and Susan Mancino

Digitally based innovations are continually changing the world around us. The technical, digital changes arrive at such speed that we barely realize their social impact. With new notions like Web 2.0, Post-Digitality, Transhumanism, and Industry 4.0, we try to face the changes on a conceptual level. However, too often, the relevant issues are taken in isolation. It is crucial to consider the change as a global social transformation, which leads us from the book-based Gutenberg Galaxy to the “Internet-based” Digital Age. This ongoing change affects social practices like communication and learning. Both communication and online learning are deeply redefined by the digital infrastructure. The digitalization process alters the media on which communication and learning processes are founded and requires a new understanding of these basic cultural practices, which are deeply interlinked.

This book aims to provide cross-disciplinary perspectives on digitization as social transformation and its impact on communication and learning. The contributions provide approaches that allow us to identify and develop conceptual approaches that might be helpful for an analytical understanding of the transformation of communication and learning in the digital age.

The book is subdivided into three parts. The first part provides an overall introduction to the topic.

Ronald C. Arnett, in Chapter 2, examines Gregory Bateson’s contribution to communication, which differentiates communication from information acquisition. Communication is relationally, contextually, and experientially framed. Meaning emerges via patterns of practices that display communicative significance.

In Chapter 3, Susan Mancino turns to the history of the World’s Fairs as a representation of the intersection of global communication and technological transformations. Emerging from the impulses of the Industrial Revolution, technological exhibition has been a cornerstone of the tradition of the World’s Fairs. After providing an overview of the history of World’s Fairs, this chapter situates the tradition within the communication discipline and provides implications within cultural, historical, and technological communication contexts.

In Chapter 4, David Kergel and Birte Heidkamp-Kergel reconstruct the complex interplay among digitization, communication, and learning. The main emphasis is on the dimension of the dynamics between neoliberal-defined communication and dialogical interaction in digital-based learning.

The second part presents contributions that reflect on different disciplinary approaches to the transformation of communication.

Arkaitz Letamendia, in Chapter 5, explores via qualitative research methods the role of digital media within resistance and protest movements. He starts with the thesis of two opposing scenarios. One of them is the aestheticization of resistances, by which they become media products, are emptied of political content, and lose their capacity for profound transformation. The other scenario is the possibility of a “Great Event,” whereby digital mediation helps to gather large numbers of people over short time frames in specific places, where community spirit and the potential for popular resistance are strengthened.

In Chapter 6, Tadeusz Rachwał analyzes the media structure of digital writing and communication. One crucial aspect is that digital media are not simple extensions of the human. Instead, the hybrid idea of life writing could be considered as a way of being with technology and may be a way of affirming the digital transformation of communication. Thus, it is possible to overcome a binary concept of an externalized technology on the one hand and the human being on the other hand.

In Chapter 7, Patrik Kjærsdam Telléus discusses the issue of whether the digital age brings a profound change or not for learning theorists to pay attention to and to investigate. He pleads for an interdisciplinary approach in which learning theorists work together with other types of thinkers and paradigms to develop a “deep” understanding and thus to “swim beneath the digital surface.”

In Chapter 8, Anthony M. Wachs raises questions about how to address the fact that the notion of the “human” is being radically reconceptualized as the person is reduced to a deterministic unit within a greater system. As such, the theories developed by posthumanists and transhumanists are no longer merely the substance of science fiction. Wachs’s chapter explores the amorphous nature of the world called cyberspace and the basic rules and tools for life within this digital world. In the course of his chapter, Wachs analyzes the grounding of the human person through communication ethics within the increasingly posthuman digital world. He develops various habits concerning communication and technologies to promote the good of human persons and community.

Andrea Catellani, in Chapter 9, considers digital transformations positioned within religions and communication as mutually embedded realities. He articulates this complex relationship against the backdrop of historical continuity. Moving from cyber religion to digital religion studies, Catellani discusses ritual, practice, prayer, and meditation within contexts of community, networks, belonging, and identity.

The contributions of the last section discuss the digital transformations of learning.

In Chapter 10, Anke Redecker analyzes the tense relationship between self-determination and neoliberal subjection in digital-based learning. On the one hand, learners are able to interact more and more frequently and flexibly. They can use creative forms of expression and presentation. But, on the other hand, the promises of creativity and autonomy made by digital scenarios are also driven by ambitions of control, governing and optimizing the apparently autonomous learner. Redecker concludes by outlining possibilities of reflection and resistance as strategies to empower the critical learner and enable the learner to deal sensibly and responsibly with the challenges of being controlled.

Michael Paulsen, in Chapter 11, analyzes the potential to shape the digitization of education. He states that it is wrong to talk about the impact of digitalization on education in an unconditionally deterministic way. The impact depends on how teachers and other actors (re)create, respond to, and modify digitalization. Teachers and others should recognize themselves as actors and thus create the digitization of education. Paulsen develops three types (the engineers, the gardeners, and the challengers) that represent how to shape digitization of education.

Rüdiger Wild, in Chapter 12, analyzes the changes and conditions of current media practice and the phenomena of digitization with the characteristics of a fluidized society. In the course of his analysis, Wild points out how media and digitized dispositions can present themselves both as consequences and as reinforcing moments of the diagnosed liquefactions. Along these lines, Wild’s analysis considers how learning under conditions of digitization could represent a counterweight to the consumerist logic of liquid modernity.

In Chapter 13, Claudia de Witt and Christina Gloerfeld analyze the possibilities of mobile learning in higher education. The authors consider mobile learning as part of a cultural transformation. As an advanced form of digital-based learning, mobile learning enables flexibility with regard to context, personalization, and communication. They conclude with a critical reflection on the potential of mobile learning and critical aspects of the increasing datafication of teaching and learning.

David Kergel and Birte Heidkamp-Kergel, in Chapter 14, reconstruct the development of digital-based learning in German higher education. Based on empirical results, They present the current attitude of teaching. The chapter concludes with a brief outline of the current concepts of higher education teaching and learning in Germany.

Dan Verständig, in Chapter 15, discusses the possibility of an integrative synthesis of algorithmic systems with questions of educational processes or transformative learning. Addressing algorithmic systems in light of cultural practices might help to get a better understanding of both the technical and the social implications. This matters for education in the sense that learning to code is not enough.

Chapter 2

Bateson’s dialogic pragmatics

The relational nature of learning and knowledge

Ronald C. Arnett

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) was eclectic in his inquiry and study. This essay explores the continuing significance of Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, an ecology of multifaceted relational dimensions of pragmatic dialogic engagement. Bateson’s insights embrace Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: that which is under our gaze is phenomenologically transformed (Bateson, 1972; Heisenberg, 1927/2014). This assumption moves dialogic study into a participant/observer genre of observation and influence. Bateson’s approach exemplifies a dialogic sensitivity in his best-known volume, which displays dialogic relational multiplicity as the bedrock of human understanding.

Impressionistic engagement with Bateson

Bateson understood serious play as keenly contextualized within art.¹ Multiple dimensions of life are forms of play and dwell within a framework of the sacred, the dwelling of the revelatory. Play does not impose but permits one to learn from the doing of a given task that fully consumes one’s consciousness. For instance, playing a musical instrument demands focus on the music in the form of abduction detailed by Charles Sanders Peirce (1966, 7.218, pp. 136f.). Abduction, unlike induction and deduction, unites the onlooker and the event within the demands of the interaction. The moment one ceases to abide in the engagement and “thinks” about the object at hand, serious play ceases. Serious play is reminiscent of impressionistic art and jazz, which shifts learning from imposition of representation to a dialogic encounter between the artist and the scene. Bateson’s dialogic pragmatics is best understood as an impressionistic picture; his work refuses reification into codified certainty.

One of the first responses to the Bateson corpus from the field of communication came from B. Aubrey Fisher, known for his work in communication theory, specifically Perspectives on Human Communication (Fisher, 1978) and Interpersonal Communication: Pragmatics of Human Relationships (Fisher & Adams, 1994). Fisher (1982) reacted to Bateson’s legacy of creative influence. Fisher emphasized a basic Batesonian assumption: Linearity houses information movement from one spot to another, with communication, on the other hand, dwelling within a dialogic realm of the unexpected.

Fisher quoted Stephen Toulmin, who asserted that Bateson displayed an evolutionary way of thinking responsive to unpredictability that was disdainful of simplistic conceptions of causality (Toulmin, 1980, pp. 39f.). Bateson’s project was contextually wide-ranging, covering interpersonal communication, group cultures, and animal contexts centered on the following presuppositions: (1) The human being is first and foremost a social actor; (2) reality does not only come to us but emerges through relational enactment; (3) relationship is the hub and pivotal theme of communication; and (4) communication is an interactive event with the maintenance of relationships requiring patterned interaction that yields meaning. Fisher stressed that Bateson understood each relational moment as a unique reenactment of patterns necessitating interpretation that resists uniform assessment (Fisher, 1982, p. 40).

Communication begins with relating. It is a competence contrary to information access and individual assurance; communication is relationally dependent on interactive rules understood in social life shaped by time and practice. Communication is fundamentally social and filled with ambiguity. In contrast, information accuracy is a social pathology dismissive of the social nature of communication. Fisher underscored the relational dimension of Bateson’s pragmatic assertion: Human beings are fundamentally social creatures, and communication is fundamentally relational.

Relational times and patterns/meaning reside in culture. In 1987, William Rawlins described Bateson’s connection with communication and culture and his association with Margaret Mead’s anthropology. Rawlins focuses on the notion of double bind theory in order to acknowledge the considerable breadth of Bateson’s work. Rawlins reminded readers that when Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson published Pragmatics of Human Communication in 1967, Bateson reacted with displeasure. He contended that there were fundamental differences between their work and his own. Isaac E. Catt (2017) argues that Bateson rejected the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Part I Introduction to communication and learning in an age of digital transformation
• Part II Communication in an age of digital transformation
• Part III Learning in an age of digital transformation
• Part IV Conclusion
• Index