Social Networking in Plain English

Duane Lewis posted this video in Webtop (a closed social networking site for WV teachers and students). I thought it was interesting and I posted the comment below...

Hi Duane,

Interesting use of the word real in the blurb "Social Networking in Plain English." Lee LaFever used the phrase real world at least three times. Kind of begs the question... Are my relationships in cyberspace real? Virtual reality games like Second Life are starting to create substantial space between what's "real" and what's "not real." I thought it was fascinating back in the primary season that political candidates actually opened offices in Second Life.

Obviously my connections in Facebook are something other than imaginary. In the 1980's an American philosopher named Hilary Putnam described a puzzle. He asked a question somthing like this: "How do I know that my brain hasn't been removed from my body and suspended in some kind of a vat of nutrients to keep it alive by a mad scientist who is stimulating my brain with electrical impulses to make me 'see' and 'feel' all the things that I think are around me?" It was a modern restatement of Descartes and his skepticism. Both men functioned on the assumption that their choices where binary: either my dog (sitting here staring at me) is "real" or it's "not real."

Lee LaFever's language is typical in discussions of the Internet, and it makes me wonder if were not developing a third alternative in the real/not real dichotomy...

I Think, Therefore I Blog…

Originally published here on March 23, 2008.

I think, therefore I blog...

I stumbled across that phrase a few years ago, surfing the Net. Regrettably, I didn't think to save the link. The author took a fairly academic tone (I think) that included references in APA format. Now though, you can find the expression on t-shirts as a manifestation of pop culture.

That first time I saw it, the author used the phrase to discuss the preoccupation our society has with introspection. Justly or unjustly, he blamed that preoccupation on Descartes. Descartes is generally considered the Father of Modern Philosophy, and most lay philosophers (like me) are familiar with his famous conclusion: I think, therefore I am.

Okay, the truth is I'm not that big on René Descartes (1596-1650). But I know a little about him...

The author of the piece that got me thinking about this topic years ago suggested that the entirety of European culture might be different if Descartes had said something else - something like, I think, and I think I'm bored, so I'll go read, and since I'm reading, I must exist. Or, maybe, something like I think, and what I think is that I need to go for a walk; and since I'm walking, I must exist. Or (of course), I think, and I think I'll go blog about what I think (and leave the idea of whether I exist at all to someone else).

I understood the author's point. But I'm not sure it holds up after a closer look at Descartes. I think Descartes' original statement was something more like "I doubt, therefore I'm think, and that must mean I exist." The Latin: Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. That chain of thoughts would make Descartes' statement somewhat more active than the simple introspection that my forgotten author was bemoaning.

There is a distinction, I think, between introspection and reflection. Introspection becomes self absorbed; and while it might be personally gratifying, it can also be pointless. We become Narcissus, paralyzed by contemplating our own image. Reflection (in contrast to simple introspection) has purpose, and that purpose usually involves our impact on those we claim to serve in our profession...

I've seen the statement reversed a few times recently. I blog, therefore I am. I guess that's true of your existence in the blogosphere. But a large number of the software packages for blogging allow you to drip blog posts on at a future date. You could be dead for weeks (or even months), yet your blog would make people think you were still alive...

Many later philosophers have assumed that the only thing Descartes knew for sure (at least at that point) was that he existed. And I suppose that part of the foundation of Constructivism as an approach to ontology is the idea that thinking is central to existing. Somehow the rest of reality is there because we think about it.

I'll have to think about that...

I'll leave you with a quote from Isaac Asimov: Writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers.

What is Reality?

Originally published here on March 5, 2008.

I touched on the concept of reality yesterday and talked a little about what the idea means to me in the context of Constructivism. Because the terms seem to be both ambiguous and important, I thought I'd spend a little time just look at the terminology I think matters...

In my very first blog post here I admitted to being at least partly an objectivist. I believe that reality is, well, real. What I mean by that is this: Had I never lived, reality would still be here (though, obviously, I wouldn't get to write about it). Reality is objective in the sense if we are all in the same place at the same time, what we see tends to be very similar. If all the teachers at my school come to my house and stand in my living room and look out the window, I suspect that all of them would agree that the animal in my neighbor's yard is a dog, and that it's black.

But while reality may be reality, and while we may all agree on what we see, it doesn't mean the same thing to each of us. And that's the second idea that seems central to Constructivism - meaning. Standing in my living room and looking out the window at that dog, my colleagues from school are all likely to attach at least slightly (maybe radically) different meanings to that dog.

• Some will look at that dog and feel warm and fuzzy thoughts: "That reminds me of the dog I had when I was a child..."


• Some will look at that dog and feel anger: "Why would someone keep nice dog like that outside on a chain? It's cruel..."


• Some will look at that dog and feel disgust: "What a nasty creature. I never have understood why someone would own a dog..."


• Some will look at that dog and feel close to nothing: "Hmm, a dog. Everyone has a dog. I wonder what's on TV tonight..."

All of them attach their own meaning to the dog they see, and it's meaning they've built themselves.

In my short experience with Constructivism, I've decided that there are people who think that reality is not objective and that people really do build their own - so they say that we build our own reality (and they mean it). There are also Constructivists who believe that we build our own meanings to attach to a more-or-less objective reality, and for reasons that seem aesthetic, perhaps poetic, they call those meanings "reality." But they understand that we only build meanings for ourselves to associate with reality, not reality itself...

A couple of other words that come up also create some ambiguity. Those words are knowledge and information. When Constructivism gets applied as a theory to the idea of learning, Constructivists often talk about building knowledge.

Knowledge is a complicated thing. I cant think much about Chinese history without thinking about the development of the Chinese language. The ideas are connected, as I see them. Other people know a lot about Chinese history without knowing much of anything about the language; they don't make the connections that I do. But the fact that the Han Dynasty was founded in 206 BC is a piece of information that stands by itself, relatively undisputed.

My knowledge of China is different from someone else's knowledge of China because I connect this or that singular piece of information (like when the Han Dynasty was founded) to different things than they connect it to. And one result of that is that we form different opinions, analyze the information differently and synthesize it differently. If knowledge is the whole of a body of facts and information (including their connections to one another), we build knowledge. But we do not build information. Information is part of reality...

I could go on. I could go on, mostly because I haven't really clarified completely for myself the ideas involved. Perhaps I never will. But the distinction between reality (which we encounter, I think) and meaning (which we attach to reality), between knowledge (which we build in something like webs that are unique to us) and information (which exists without us) - those are important distinctions, I believe...

Phonemes and the Construction of Reality

Originally published here on March 4, 2008.

Before they have words in their heads, before the speech of others has semantic content for them, toddlers begin to parse up the sounds they hear and create categories in their minds. We call those cognitive categories phonemes.

Phonemes are one of the clearest examples of how we take the world around us and building chunks of meaning for ourselves. Call that "reality" if you want. It is, in a sense. It's our reality, at least. I'd rather say we build our own meaning to attach to reality, but whatever. Same thing...

One of the easiest ways to explain how we class sounds (vibrations of the air that have physical properties and can be measured with a machine) into phonemes is to look at the phoneme we usually call "L."



"L" is not a sound, it's an idea - an idea about how to group all the sounds together that you call “L” – different sounds that together make up “L” in your mind.

I know what you're probably thinking: “What do you mean? L is L.” And I have to say, “Not really.”

I explained it somewhere else like this:

Think about it for a moment. When you say “like,” you take the tip of your tongue and press it fairly hard against the back of your two top front teeth and you spread your tongue out like it was a hammock inside your mouth. When you say “full,” your tongue may not touch your front teeth at all; instead of spreading it out, you bunch it up in a ball in the back of your mouth and maybe the tip of it rests gently on the bony ridge you have behind your top teeth. You make a different sound at the beginning of “like” than at the end of “pull,” but you call both of them “L” if you speak English, because English speakers group them together as one phoneme.

Doesn’t everybody do that? No. In Russian those two sounds each get their own letter. You can put the “L” in “pull” at the beginning of Russian words and the “L” in “like” at the end of Russian words.

That's how it works. You group sounds together and (eventually) give them a name.

A couple of thoughts...

First, don't we all build the same reality? An "L" for you is an "L" for me, right? So how is that Constructivist? Well the answer to that is that we pretty much all build the same reality here, in our little piece of Appalachia. But if we were Russian (or Japanese or Korean), the reality we'd build would most likely be different from Appalachian reality. The fact that, as a group our different "realities" look a lot alike lends weight to the ideas of Lev Vygotsky and the Social Constructivists. They thought that constructing reality was a social activity.

Second, if you're dyslexic you probably have problems with phonemic awareness. You might build the phonemes in your head just like the next kid (which is why you can talk and understand people), but you have problems recognizing them as such. And that means that the next layer of your reality (which has to do with reading) is a little different from the reality of the other kids around you...

Trust the Spiral

Originally published here on March 2, 2008.

I was introduced to the idea of a spiral curriculum almost three years ago now when the University of Chicago's Everyday Math curriculum was put in place in McDowell County. Like almost all the other teachers, I hated it for the first three or four weeks. Some teachers hated it longer than that, but I came to appreciate the new emphasis it brought to math and how math seemed to permeated much of the school day. I like math. After all, we all use math everyday...

The concepts inherent in a spiral curriculum are simple.

• Learners usually need repeated exposure to new ideas before they fully "get" them.


• Everyone learns at their own rate, in their own way (and isn't that a very Constructivist idea!?!).


• There's no sense trying to get students to swallow a whole new idea now, all at once; which, translated, means you don't always have to teach to mastery.


• If this or that student doesn't get something this time, don't worry. They'll get it (or at least come closer to getting it) next time.

There will be a next time. The concept of a spiral curriculum is one in which things get come back to.

You teach in something like a circle. We'll work on regrouping in the first week of November. We'll do it again in the second week of December. And again in the third week of January, the first week of March and the middle of April. We'll sneak a day of it in a few other times and mention it in passing a few times beyond that. It will stick in almost every child's mind. Some will master it a year ahead of time, most will begin to understand it when it's introduced and master it at grade level, and for a few we'll lay a foundation for future success and they'll understand it eventually (though a year or two later than we would have liked).

It was hard to stop always teaching to mastery. But I like the spiral now.

Of course the problem we face now is that the philosophy of the spiral curriculum doesn't really line up with the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind. As an educational interventionist, I have no problem understanding that some kids will take an extra year or two to "get it" - but that they probably will eventually "get it." The spiral will come back around and pick those last kids up. You should trust the spiral to do that.

But in a few years the accountability provisions of NCLB will mean that schools don't make AYP because a handful of kids haven't come to their spot on the spiral yet. The question then will be this: "How do we make the law reflect what we actually believe about learning?"

My only answer in this election year is that if helps to vote...

Away from Ontology…

Originally published here on March 1, 2008.

I should admit that my discussion of Constructivism until now has been more about philosophy than learning theory. And I suppose I've purposely confused the two because I don't see how you can discuss one without first discussing the other.

After months of neglect, I dusted off my copy of Plato's Republic a few nights ago and looked back over the Allegory of the Cave. Reading about Plato's cave was what first got me interested in ontology - the study of our conception of reality.

But I suppose that Constructivist learning theory can be discussed without reconciling yourself completely to a particular philosophical view. I reserve the right to periodically return to philosophy, but I'll try and talk more about learning theory when I deal with Constructivism in the future...

It Is What It Is… Really?

Originally published here on February 27, 2008.

You hear the expression from time to time: It is what it is.

Sounds kind of objectivist, doesn't it? Like, there's this thing out there and it's obvious what it is - even though we're probably having trouble talking about it, which is why the expression gets used. Since it's so obvious what this thing is, why discuss it any further...?

The expression got a lot of attention recently when Congress itself decided to try and figure out what it meant. They were trying to decide what to think of secretly taped conversations involving baseball pitcher Roger Clemens; the expression is used on the tape. For their purposes, the Congressional committee involved seems to have decided that the phrase means something like "I don't want to talk about it anymore" - though no new laws about speech or idioms came out of the hearings.

I have an alternative to "It is what it is" that I like much better. My alternative is "It is what you make it." After all, if it always really was want it is, why would anyone write poetry about it.

As I type this, it's snowing outside. Snow is what it is, right? I think Robert Frost would disagree. If he agreed, there wouldn't have been much point in writing Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening . Like most poems, this one helps you think of something differently - or at least see it better.

Poetry helps you construct new meanings for yourself around things that you encounter. You can shrug off the poem and say, "I don't think I'll build that meaning for myself." Or you can embrace the poem and say, "Maybe snow is more beautiful than I realized..."

Even if you reject the poem's ideas about snow and woods, reading the poem almost forces you to further define what those things mean to you. It's an illustration of Constructivism that's hard to deny.

Without Theory… (Why Think About It?)

Originally published here on February 26, 2008.

I had a professor at the Australian National University who used to say, "Without theory, there is no practice?" His name was Phil Rose and I think he still lectures there, 25 years after I left.

He was right, for any practical purpose. Oh sure, you can do stuff in a classroom (or wherever, depending on your field) without having a clear theory to justify your actions. Probably, the stuff you do in such circumstances you do either because you were told to (in which case the person who told you to do it likely has a theory) or you do because it's the path of least resistance, the easiest thing to do (which usually makes it bad practice).

If you practice your profession in any meaningful way, though, you almost certainly have a theory that drives your actions at work.

I don't know if Dr. Rose was consciously quoting Louis Pasteur or if great minds (Dr. Rose's and Pasteur's) just think alike. Pasteur said this:

Without theory, practice is but routine born of habit. Theory alone can bring forth and develop the spirit of inventions.

So the question becomes, "Why am I doing this?" Why am I doing it this way? Why don't I try that, instead?

If I can clarify and articulate my own theory, however eclectic it may be, I have a frame of reference within which I can access my practices in the classroom. Doing that might make me a better teacher.

That's why I think about it. At least, that's one of the reasons...

Objectivism, Constructivism, and the Times Table

Originally published here on February 25, 2008.

I had a student once. They* had memorized their math facts through the tens before they became my student. But they seemed to understand those facts as unrelated pieces of information - unconnected data islands.

Nine times three is 27. Eight times six is 48.

If I asked them for seven times 11, or for two times 12, they gave me a blank look. They didn't know, and they didn't know how to find out. The idea of a pattern of numbers, a pattern that could be extended beyond what they already new, seemed foreign.

I'll come back to that...

I recently came across a page on Constructivism by Bonnie Skaalid done while she was a doctoral student in the late 1990's at the University of Saskatchewan. She wrote something that struck me as epitomizing one of the problems, I think, in the articulating Constructivist theory.

It is impossible to discuss constructivism without contrasting it with its opposite, objectivism.

And down the road we go to an "either/or" discussion of whether I'm a Constructivist or an Objectivist....

I'm willing to be both. When we set those positions up as opposites, we set up extreme positions as straw men that we can beat the stuffing out of in order to prove that our position is right. It seems more productive to me to think of those extremes as ends of a continuum.

The problem with objectivism is that no one is objective. Science builds safeguards against bias into its methodology because objectivity is so difficult to come by. So, assuming reality is real, that doesn't mean you see it accurately. Acknowledge some inaccuracy in your perception of reality and you've moved a notch down the continuum toward Constructivism. You don't really even have to acknowledge an inaccuracy; you just have to acknowledge that sensation (which happens at the finger tips) and perception (which happens in the brain) are different things.

Let's go back to my student.

It wasn't a problem I ever solved. We parted company at the end of a school year. They knew 100 math facts, I knew they thought of them differently than most students. And I felt like that they managed to learn those math facts without learning the process of arriving at them or the connections between them.

I come back to my experience with that student often. I use that experience to consider definitions for terms like meaning and knowledge.

I think when enough people share some experience, especially if it can be quantified, the chance become good that it is an objective reality. I think I could win an argument with most reasonable people about whether nine times three is 27. The biggest problem would be finding someone who wanted to bother to argue about it. The idea that nine times three is 27 is, well, reality. Objective reality, I'd say. There are first and second graders at my school who don't know that. It’s knowledge they'll get later.

For the student we've been talking about, though, something other than knowledge was involved. They knew what nine times three was, but knowing didn't hold much meaning for them - at least nt in the context of math. And because it wasn't meaningful to them, they couldn't really use the knowledge very often.

The student had a disability. Their disability served to illustrate the profound difference between knowledge and meaning. And seeing that difference in them makes me consider what it is that we construct - knowledge, or meaning.

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*I use the plural "they" instead of "he" or "she" on purpose as a way of protecting confidentiality. English doesn't have gender neutral singular pronouns in the third person like (for example) Finnish. So I use the plural because, in the setting of the small schools where I've worked, doing so makes it hard for a reader to guess a student's identity...

Why Constructivist Leanings? (About the Blog’s Title)

Originaly published here on February 23, 2008

I grew up thinking that reality was, well, you know - real.

I did my undergraduate work in psychology at a small Georgia college. Gerald Ford was President when I started and BF Skinner was still held in pretty high esteem. Constructivism was just beginning to come into vogue. And the psych faculty of my college thought that the best way to study behavior was to begin small, with something like rats, and come up with principles that could be generalized.

It was general psychology, not educational psychology. The idea that the mind could be meaningfully studied was largely scoffed at because the mind (if it existed at all) was unobservable. Don't get me wrong. We got a nice dose of Piaget and a sprinkling of Bandura, statistics, the philosophy of science, and Behaviorism took pride of place in the department.

In retrospect, I remember one professor we had who was a registered nurse before she got her PhD in psychology. She was dyslexic. She would write on the board a lot. Periodically she'd realize that students were either puzzled or snickering, and she'd begin to point at letters and say, "Is it this one?" She'd erase the offending letter (usually written backward) and write it correctly. I suppose it should have dawned on someone in the room, what with all of us studying psychology, that maybe observable behavior could prove that not everyone perceived reality the same way...

I didn't recognize it as such at the time, but I suppose my constructivist leanings began as a graduate student in linguistics at the Australian National University. It's amazing the amount of perceptual diversity that you come across by looking at languages. An easy example is that we're communicating at the moment in a language that doesn't assign gender to very many inanimate objects. A Mercedes in Germany, for example, is seen as somehow masculine: der Mercedes. A newspaper is feminine for some reason: die zeitung. And water, for reasons that escape me (but seem obvious to German-speakers) is neuter: das wasser. That's a pretty different perception of reality. A newspaper is a newspaper (or so I'd always thought), but Germans see them differently than I do.

I've since discovered that Noam Chomsky shredded Skinner's ideas about language all the way back in 1967, when he began to review Skinner's 1957 book, Verbal Behavior.

I graduated from the Australian National University with a Graduate Diploma in General Linguistics (with Merit) in 1993.

My real interest in Constructivism as a learning theory and philosophical school began only recently when I wrote a short piece for Suite101 on the 21st Century Learning Initiative. I realized that in order to understand and evaluate 21st Century Learning I was going to have to understand Constructivism better. So I started reading about it.

I learned that I have Constructivist leanings. I'm not sure I'm a full blown Constructivist (though that could come with time). And some of the more extreme forms of Constructivism still seem almost silly to me. But it's clear to me that meaning is personal and happens inside a student's head.

Can I change that word, meaning, to knowledge? I suppose that depends on your definition of knowledge. But ask me again in a few months.

In the mean time, I'm trying to come to grips with my Constructivist leanings...