Dialogic: Education for the Internet Age

Rupert Wegerif

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136277917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Dialogic: Education for the Internet Age argues that despite rapid advances in communications technology, most teaching still relies on traditional approaches to education, built upon the logic of print, and dependent on the notion that there is a single true representation of reality. In practice, the use of the Internet disrupts this traditional logic of education by offering an experience of knowledge as participatory and multiple.

This new logic of education is dialogic and characterises education as learning to learn, think and thrive in the context of working with multiple perspectives and ultimate uncertainty. The book builds upon the simple contrast between observing dialogue from an outside point of view, and participating in a dialogue from the inside, before pinpointing an essential feature of dialogic: the gap or difference between voices in dialogue which is understood as an irreducible source of meaning. Each chapter of the book applies this dialogic thinking to a specific challenge facing education, re-thinking the challenge and revealing a new theory of education.

Areas covered in the book include:

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• dialogical learning and cognition

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• dialogical learning and emotional intelligence

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• educational technology, dialogic 'spaces' and consciousness

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• global dialogue and global citizenship

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• dialogic theories of science and maths education

The challenge identified in Wegerif's text is the growing need to develop a new understanding of education that holds the potential to transform educational policy and pedagogy in order to meet the realities of the digital age. Dialogic: Education for the Internet Age draws upon the latest research in dialogic theory, creativity and technology, and is essential reading for advanced students and researchers in educational psychology, technology and policy.

1

THE CHALLENGE

The Internet has changed everything. Although it has been around for a while now we are only just beginning to explore the many ways in which it can enable us to do things differently. The Internet has obvious potential for education. But the kind of education that it supports is not exactly the same as the kind of education found in schools. In fact there seems to be some tension between the concept of education that emerges from engagement with the Internet and the concept of education that lies behind schooling. The concept of education afforded by print is a form of monologic which can be summarized as the transmission of true representations. The concept of education afforded by the Internet is a form of dialogic which can be summarized as participation in ongoing enquiry in an unbounded context. Understanding the shift from print to the Internet as a shift of underlying ways of thinking from monologic to dialogic can help us understand what is really happening to us now, which can help us to design the future together.

What is happening to us?

The Internet has been with us for a while now but we are still just at the beginning of understanding how best to work with it and to live with it. Various attempts have already been made to rethink education through the experience of the Internet. I think that most of them fail to understand the emerging new logic of the Internet Age. The problem is that we are trying to understand the future in terms of ways of thinking that helped to guide us in the past. In this book I uncover the logic of the Internet Age and I apply this new logic – a form of dialogic – to understand education.

The obvious affordances of the Internet for education are becoming a commonplace experience for many of us. Recently I heard my 12-year-old son talking to someone while sitting in front of his laptop. I looked over his shoulder and saw the face of his slightly older cousin on the top right hand side of his screen while on the left of the screen was a website. His cousin was talking him through a complicated procedure. It turned out my son had decided to try to build a music collection by stripping the music tracks out of his favourite YouTube music videos. He had got stuck and so he video-Skyped his cousin who talked him through how to do the job. I wondered if this was legal, but I was impressed at this collaborative problem solving.

When my son was about 8 years old he became really frustrated with a stage in a stand-alone video game, I think it was Lego Batman. Seeing him practically crying on the sofa I wanted to help. I recalled how I usually managed to solve computer problems by Googling the obscure error messages that pop up on my screen when something goes wrong. This kind of search often led me to an online discussion forum where people offer each other advice on what the error message means and how to solve the error. I therefore suggested this strategy to my son. Together we Googled his video game problem using an initially vague search question like ‘stuck on lego-batman stage three, how do you get the door open?’ We soon found detailed ‘walk-through’ videos of how to get through every challenge in the video game. These ‘walk-through’ videos had been made and uploaded by other young players just to help out. I was impressed. It struck me that these children had taken a lot of trouble to help people that they did not even know. I wondered what motivated them. On reflection I thought that it might be the same sort of motivation that leads me to want to share my own passions and discoveries with others by writing articles and books.

Thinking and writing with the Internet now is a very different experience for me than the kind of thinking and writing that I remember from before the Internet. In those days when I had the glimmer of an idea that I wanted to follow up, I searched the library catalogues to find relevant books, I went to the place on the shelves indicated and when this proved fruitless, as it often did, I had to order articles from the British Library or recall books that were out with another reader and I then had to wait for days or weeks for them to arrive. When they did arrive they often proved disappointing or no longer relevant as my ideas had already moved on. Now, whenever I have an idea that I think might be fruitful, I Google it to see if others have tackled this same problem before, or just to find out what other people have to say. Yesterday, for example, I tried to find out about the impact of print on ways of thinking in China and I found a bibliography on the web of studies of the history of literacy in China that will help me approach this topic. I felt grateful that someone was prepared to offer such a useful service for me in this way. In return I try to make sure that my educational research is available for free on the web for anyone who might find it useful. My son has not put up any walkthroughs to video games in order to help others yet but I think that he will one day soon.

Surveys of Internet behaviour show that these kinds of informal educational experiences online are common now for everyone who is connected to the Internet, regardless of age. My mother, who is 80, shares tips on her family tree with others who are searching to construct their own family tree. She also shares the beautiful paintings that she has made throughout her life but which, up until now, have had only a very limited audience. Facebook, which began in 2004 in Mark Zuckerberg’s student dorm, now, as I write in 2012, has 1 billion users and is still growing. It essentially consists of creating and sharing online resources many of which include the sort of thoughts and tips that others can and do learn from. As people learn about each other in social networks like Facebook they also learn about music, films, books, politics and places worth visiting.

Informal educational activity using the Internet has become so normal now that we perhaps think that it does not imply a need for any new educational theory. I do not agree. It is interesting that the one place children are not connected to the Internet is the school classroom.¹ New businesses have arisen because of the Internet, old businesses have been transformed by the Internet, but one major human activity which remains largely unaffected by the Internet is formal education. This may be because of a deep-level incompatibility. If we think through the kind of education that is happening now on the Internet it embodies a quite different educational logic from the logic that lies behind formal education systems.

The Internet will not go away. All the signs are that the Internet will continue growing in bandwidth, in number of users and in associated technologies giving access in more situations. This means more new uses, more compelling interfaces and more immersive experiences. It is important that we take the trouble to step back and think through the implications of what is happening to us now. Understanding what is happening to us might enable us to be less reactive to change in the future and more proactive in response to the opportunities that the Internet Age offers. We need a new theory of education that understands the Internet in order to be able to design a better future.

From print to Internet: from monologic to dialogic

In this book I argue that the Internet is a disruptive technology for education. It cannot simply be incorporated into existing formal education systems without changing them. This is because existing formal education systems are built around the logic of print and the Internet has a different inner logic. Print can be used in many ways, of course, but the formal schooling system has been built around its affordance for monologic and serves to reinforce the monologic potential of print. Monologic assumes that there is one correct version of reality and one correct method of thinking. The correct version of reality is represented in the books that are selected as the core curriculum and schools transmit these representations into the minds of students. Despite some variations and experiments, on the whole the model of schooling is remarkably similar all around the world.²

One distinctive new affordance of the Internet, in contrast to print and most other mass-media, is that it is intrinsically participatory. Like print, the Internet can be used in many ways but unlike print, it affords dialogic. Dialogic, as opposed to monologic, assumes that there is always more than one voice. More than this, dialogic assumes that meaning is never singular but always emerges in the play of different voices in dialogue together. An implication of this, which I bring out later, is that a certain kind of infinity or unbounded potential is opened onto by dialogic, an infinity of possible meaning which monologic tries to close down or to ignore. The point of dialogic education, is therefore, not so much transmission of representations, but drawing students into participation in dialogues in an ultimately unbounded context. In other words, as well as having to learn how to dialogue with this or that specific other and this or that carefully bounded cultural voice, students need to learn how to dialogue with the Infinite Other, an other that they cannot know in advance or pin down or even ever fully understand.

I will bring out the nature of dialogic education in more detail in the next two chapters but before that, to preempt a possible misunderstanding, I want to say that it is not simply the same thing as student-centred education or constructivism. If one wants to join a dialogue it is wise not to butt in too abruptly. It is best to take time initially just listening to what people are talking about and learning how they are talking about it. Dialogic education is not only about joining in dialogues with our peers in the present time, say, for example, getting children to talk together in a classroom, but more essentially it is also about engaging in the longer-term dialogue of the culture. This implies dialogue with absent cultural voices. In other words drawing children and students into dialogue with the voices of wisdom and experience from our past is a key function of education and is part of helping them to find their own voice. Teachers therefore have an essential role in summing up the dialogue so far and guiding newcomers in how to participate in it. Dialogic education is neither student-centred nor teacher-centred, or, rather, it is both student-centred and teacher-centred, because it is dialogue-centred.

Dialogic space

Although many aspects of dialogic education make it compatible with both socialconstructivism³ and situated learning theory,⁴ there is an important difference with both that makes it useful as a distinct way to understand education for the Internet age. This difference is the underlying dialogic gap, a gap which manifests in experience as dialogic space. The dialogic gap is the gap between perspectives in a dialogue.

When we think of dialogues we probably think of empirical dialogues that occur at a certain place and time between particular people, three children talking together in a classroom for example. In doing this we are looking at dialogues as if from the outside. But dialogues also have an inside. On the inside of the dialogue we might be talking about people who are not present, distant places and past or future events. From the outside dialogues are always situated in space and time but when lived from the inside, dialogues establish their own space and time. This is what distinguishes a dialogue from an interaction. Robots can interact but their interactions remain in external space. When humans enter into dialogue there is a new space of meaning that opens up between them and includes them within it. The external ‘objective’ view that locates things in their proper place is always ‘monologic’ because it assumes a single fixed perspective. The internal view that takes the other seriously is ‘dialogic’ because, when experienced from inside dialogues, meaning always assumes at least two perspectives held together in creative tension. Without this creative tension over a gap of difference there would be no experience of meaning.

Social constructivism and connectionism and networked learning theory and other theories that claim to be responding to the new educational needs of the Internet Age often seem to assume only an external view and do not go beyond this. Yes, it is quite true, as connectivism and networked learning claims, that people can be looked at from the outside as if they are nodes in a network, but unlike machines they also have an inside perspective which enables them to transcend the network and to rethink the network.⁵

The space of the Internet that is sometimes called ‘cyberspace’, is not an external space that can be measured in terms of servers and fibre-optic cables: it is a dialogic space supporting the interplay of billions of voices. Yes, as social constructivism says, people do construct meanings together in dialogues, but dialogic education is not only concerned with the quality of what they construct but, more importantly, it is concerned with the quality of the space within which they construct and with the quality of the educational dialogues through which they construct. Good education is not just about making things, even if we label these things ‘meanings’ or ‘cultural artefacts’, but it is also, more importantly, about expanding the capacity to participate in dialogue.

Re-wiring our brains?

The increasing use of the Internet has led to educational concerns often focusing on the danger of brains being wired differently. Nicholas Carr argued, in his influential book, The Shallows, that the use of the Internet has inevitably distracting effects leading to brains with short attention spans incapable of deep reflection.⁶ His main contrast is between the multi-tasking and short-term kind of attention of new technology use by the typical teenager with the experience of thinking gained through longer and more contemplative activities like reading books. In the UK the distinguished neuro-physiologist, Baroness Susan Greenfield appeared to lend support to this argument with various talks and interviews about the danger of minds being damaged. She told a House of Lords enquiry, for example, that children’s experiences on social networking sites

are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity.⁷

These are dramatic claims that point to an important topic for research. However, I suspect that it is a little too soon to pass judgement on the Internet. It is noteworthy that perhaps the best known dialogic educational thinker, Socrates, is reported by Plato in his dialogue, the Phaedrus, to have made some remarkably similar claims about the infantilizing effects of the then new information technology of writing. Writing, Socrates said, will lead to a loss of memory, as people can now just look things up instead of having to learn everything by heart. It is easy to give the impression of being clever by copying other people’s speeches, Socrates continued, but a text cannot answer back. Writing therefore encourages people to be superficial and does not support learning to reason in dialogue with others which is the true source of intelligence. Socrates’ implication is that by living in a world of written words one can avoid the face-to-face accountability for one’s own proper words, which is essential for moral development.⁸

What if Socrates was right? Carr and Greenfield’s arguments point to the interesting fact that our use of communications technologies shapes the way our brains work and the kind of thoughts that we are capable of having. Drawing attention to the new brain-shaping impact of Internet use also makes us aware, retrospectively, of how print-based education must have shaped the brains of generations of children. Print-based education probably has some positive benefits or it would not have arisen and spread to become almost universal. But what if it also has limitations that impact negatively on the potential for human development and for collective well-being?

Before mass print-based education, culture everywhere was largely oral and thinking was mostly understood in terms of dialogues. According to Toulmin, the tradition of thinking about thinking as a type of dialogue was maintained up to the sixteenth century by humanist writers such as Erasmus and Montaigne.⁹ Toulmin points out that there was a major shift in Europe in the seventeenth century with thinkers such as Descartes, Leibniz and Newton. This new generation of thinkers at the beginning of what became called the Enlightenment, replaced the image of arguments as utterances in dialogues with the image of arguments as propositions in proofs.

The shift in the dominant means of communication that we are now undergoing is bigger than the shift introduced by Gutenberg’s printing press but is in fact closer in significance to the shift from oracy to literacy that Socrates lived through. The Internet, like oracy, is a medium that affords participation and dialogue. It is not surprising, therefore, that some of the changes that are occurring now might seem like a return to the experiences and ways of thinking of oral societies. However, the Internet is also much more than a return to oracy. Like print, it can support dialogue at a distance, both distance of space and distance in time. And like print, ideas that flow through the Internet remain after they have been expressed, carried in a form that enables them to be reflected upon and improved. In this way the Internet continues to support print-based ways of thinking, but it locates this kind of thinking more clearly than before in a larger context, the context of the long-term living dialogue of humanity. Calling this dialogue ‘living’ is another way of saying that it is unpredictable and unbounded in its potential because nobody can get outside of it and tell you where it will go or what its limits are.

For the last 400 years or so, theory has been dom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The challenge
• 2. Educating dialogue
• 3. Educating reason
• 4. Educating creativity
• 5. Educating technology
• 6. Educating science1
• 7. Educating the planet1
• 8. Education into dialogue
• Notes
• References
• Index