scattered realizations, things to think about

Reading Qiannan's post about play in the research meeting today morning made me better understand the basis of research involving the internet and education. As Michael said, "this is basically what explains everything we do", it hit me. The process of entering a virtual environment helps assimilate information in ways that transcends the sensory field, allowing social constructivism to manifest within such environments to come up with balanced solutions to problems. In MUVE platforms used for education, objects and symbols built from pixels form the centers of discussion for students, and the ability for immediate feedback helps facilitate the co-construction of knowledge. Relating this to the notion of seamless civil discourse in the public sphere that theorists such as Habermas favor, it becomes clear that sometimes, the coffee houses and salons that are described by democratically inclined critical theorists may pose some cultural and space-based constraints upon free exchange. Distance education classrooms seem to mirror place-based, direct instruction contexts, because the "culture" associated with teaching lies in making it unidirectional and instrumental. This is something that Clara mentioned in her post as well, with regards to the notion of drinking, partying, and other common motifs regarded as the symbols of social interaction in college culture.

Direct instruction in distance education favors top-down, hierarchical processes.

Just as we tend to associate parties and happy hour with socializing because of how stereotypes and cliches pervade through our student bodies, we tend to associate teaching with top-down processes, because this is what is embedded in the culture of teaching and learning. Reading Clara's post really made me think about why we do certain things, or say that certain things are "just to be the way they are". Vygotsky says the source of knowledge is cultural. Wouldn't that explain a lot of things? Habermas would call this the accumulation of presuppositions within the lifeworld of education, that shape opinions about it, and create perceptions of the process itself. However, when we try to move beyond these presuppositions and encourage communication in distance education contexts, it becomes easier to facilitate deliberative democracy through social processes, as the internet blurs spatial boundaries, and demarcations set by culture and ethnicity.  It is interesting to see how theorists being published around the same time have similar thoughts.

    The internet can help overcome ethnical and racial boundaries to create commons

Users of the internet may be regulated by certain platforms, but on less moderated ones, they can create their own lifeworlds and understand how to bridge their social capital with one another to create shared knowing, and epistemic empowerment through this shared knowing. The reason why we are "reticent to share"as I mentioned in my previous post, is related to how individualistic, competitive, instrumental practices have pervaded through education to help perpetuate stereotypes, and maintain a certain economic, political and social "status quo" rather than focusing on individual needs. I think it was pretty cool (for me at least) to have realized that the basic differences between children and apes that Vygotsky talks about form the basis of most theories that talk about learning as a social process. For a budding theorist, understanding the ways in which different theories interact is imperative, and I feel like I'm finally getting somewhere with all this jargon.