Dialogic

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Dialogic

• Education for the Internet Age
• Rupert Wegerif

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Overview

• 1) Transition from Print Age to Internet Age
• - From monologic to dialogic but with a twist
• 2) New dialogic theory for Internet age
• - Old dialogic plus multi-media dialogue between
  question and unbounded horizon
• 3) Educating technology
• importance of tools as voices
• 4) Learning to learn together with the Internet

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Why isnt the Internet used much in schools?

• The Internet has obvious affordances for
  learning. We all use it to look things up. It
  supports learning communities.
• Teenagers in the USA now spend 7 hours a day with
  gadgets ie all the time they have except when
  asleep or in school! Why not school?
• Answer because schools follow the logic of
  print. The Internet does not fit. It is
  disruptive'.

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e.g Encylopedia Britannica vs Wikipedia (and
Qwikipedia)
Authority of truth, One-to-many
A dialogue, Peer-to-peer Participation Need to
check
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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?

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• 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)

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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)
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The medium is the message.

• Talk situated in here and now. Affords dialogic.
• Writing supports reflection and cumulative
  science but supports unsituated ideal of Truth as
  a representation. Affords monologic in
  combination with formal education.
• Schools embody the logic of print, education is
  the transmission of knowledge found in books,
  assessed by solitary written exams.
• Internet Affords a return to dialogic but
  unbounded by locality.

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Reversal of real and ideal Eric Whitacre's
Virtual Choir - 'Lux Aurumque'
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Internet as disruptive

• As bandwidth increases and smart-phones
  proliferate we can begin to see the potential of
  the Internet for anytime anywhere education.
• A disruptive technology is one that improves a
  service in a way that is unexpected and so goes
  on to create its own new value system and way
  of doing things eventually displacing an existing
  technology. Eg peer-to-peer music sharing.
• The Internet is a disruptive technology for
  education. It has a different inner logic from
  the print-based education system.

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Part 2 Dialogic
Monologic (Print?) Dialogic (Internet?)
One voice one truth Many voices
Closed Open to Other
Representation Relationship
Identity Difference
Reification (outside view) Participation (inside view)
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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).

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In every dialogue there is a third voice and so
the call of infinity
Infinite other
Superaddressee
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Expanding dialogic with chiasmI see the world,
the world sees meFigure Ground
Tension and mutual envelopement
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Key concepts

• Dialogic gap without difference, no meaning
• Dialogic space internality of dialogues
• Inside-outside chiasm around gap as hinge
• Dialogic emerges between an inside perspective
  and an unbounded (infinite) outside perspective
  held together in the creative tension of a
  dialogue.

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Ontogenesis of thought is dialogiceg Visual
cliff experiment
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Phylogenesis of thought is dialogic

• Symbolic vs iconic (Deakin)
• Theoretical vs metaphoric (Donald)
• Holistic vs analytic (Dehaene)
• Top down attention vs bottom up voices

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Consciousness is dialogic
Global workspace theory many voices talking all
the time in brain pre-conscous dialogue - only
one makes it to the threshold of conscoiusness at
a time and broadcasts back to the rest. Education
trains attention using symbolic technologies like
graphs, tables, taxonomies etc
But recall min i-positions (Hermans) are all
around us in world as well as in brain ie the
world is our workspace
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3 types of consciousness

• Sentient figure/ground awareness metaforic and
  iconic, generative
• Attentional socially directed, self-conscious,
  analytic focus
• Dialogic flow self as dialogue between inside
  and outside requiring trust and participation

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Collective thinking

• Orientation within shared worlds (Stahl)
• Foregrounds give different perspectives but
  background horizons overlap. Thinking and
  consciousness unite both sides the lit up focus
  and the dark background
• The shared background of the Internet can support
  participation in an increasingly global creative
  intelligence otherwise known as the democracy
  that is to come

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Some principles of dialogic education

1. Aim is dialogue as an end in itself ie asking
   better questions, not finding final answers
2. Engage in dialogue first, teach skills and facts
   afterwards when needed (just in time)
3. Drawing learners into participation in those
   dialogues that are powerful and shape their
   lives.
4. The dialogue between a question and an unbounded
   horizon ie listening to the supposed unconscious

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Part 3 Educating technology
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Tools or voices?

• The first signs, cave paintings, were voices not
  tools. They evoked the superaddressee voices of
  the tribe (Lewis-Williams, 2002)
• The pictures, videos and avatars of the Internet
  are similarly more like voices than like tools.
• Progress piggy-backs on signs. Dialogue produces
  an insight which is given a sign and becomes a
  voice in the next dialogue.

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Learning to learn together

• The key competence children need to use the
  Internet is Learning how to learn together or
  L2L2.
• They need to be prepared to question and
  challenge and collaborate in shared inquiry with
  the Internet.

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Providing roles

• Epistemic games allow students to role play
  being a journalist or a bio-scientist and seeing
  the world from that role.

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Metafora L2L2

• An ICT system to support learning how to learn
  together (L2L2).
• Through literature review we isolated some key
  features of L2L2. We turned these into icons
  within an ICT environment to support planning and
  reflection of inquiries stimulated by real-world
  challenges.
• Design-based research in secondary schools in the
  UK, Spain, Greece and Israel over one year
  developed and evaluated this tool and found that
  it can increase awareness of the key aspects of
  learning together.

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e.G Lleida study with Metafora

• Used the visual language to help structure a
  real inquiry into the pollution of the Segre
  resulting in a real letter to the civic
  authorities responsible.

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Dialogic Education for the Internet Age

• What to teach?
• Learning to learn together ( L2L2).
• The dialogue so far.
• 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

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Summary

• 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
  unbounded dialogic.
• Dialogic education for the Internet Age is about
  drawing people into collective creative
  intelligence, teaching L2L2, expanding and
  resourcing the space of dialogue