Inadvertent Anti-Learning

For the past couple of weeks I've watched a lot of the NCAA College Basketball Tournament.  Even with Illinois' decisive loss to UConn, certainly very disappointing for Illini fans, I continued to watch other games.  The commercials for these games remained remarkably constant, with the usual suspects being fast food commercials, insurance commercials, and car/truck commercials.  There was one commercial that didn't fit this mold and I wondered why it was there.  This one was from Grammarly Business and was about using AI to resolve an office scheduling problem.  Twenty years earlier, when I was a campus administrator, that sort of problem would have been solved by the secretaries working together.  Now there is an automated alternative, la-de-da.  But the commercial implied the solution was beyond human capacity.  It's that thought which triggered the ideas in the rest of this post.  

Let's move on and talk about learning.  A few years ago I featured the following graphic in a post called A Simple Model of How Adults Learn.   (In turn, that post was part of a Website I called the Non-Course, which I developed during Covid in an attempt to encourage college students to learn on their own and develop the reading habit.  Alas, it was just me blowing off steam and had no other impact.)

There is nothing original in this graphic.  You can find the ideas previously expressed in a paper by Kenneth Bruffee called Collaborative Learning and the "Conversation of Mankind."  Evidently, a way to externalize one's thinking is to engage in conversation with another person who wants to do likewise.  Yet writing, a different form of externalization, can also be considered as conversation, in this case with an imagined reader.  And if ingest happens via reading, then the reader can be thought of as being in conversation with the author.  Ditto for reflection, which is internalized conversation. 

Personally, I have found this conversation metaphor extremely useful in considering how we learn.  And it has helped me in affirming a belief I've had for some time.  The meta skill we want to see develop in the learner is the ability to produce a coherent narrative, one that takes account of the relevant points, sequences them in a way where others can understand the ordering which in turn makes the narrative comprehensible, and in total offers an explanation for the topic of discussion. 

How does one develop this meta skill in the learner?  That too is no mystery; it takes a lot of practice of the right sort.  I have seen it called "effortful study" but I believe most now refer to it as deliberate practice.  This conveys the idea that the practice must be challenging to the learner, but the learner must view the goal of the practice not so far out of reach as to be impossible to attain.  The deliberate part is comparatively new to our understanding, but that practice is needed in learning is hardly a new idea.  The following quote dates back to the 17th or 18th century.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Sir Richard Steele

To make these ideas more concrete, much of the deliberate practice the learner should engage in must require transfer - which means using the new idea in a novel context. A successful adult learner has developed the habit to practice transfer whenever exposed to a new idea.  This is a way that the learner can test whether the idea is really understood.

My sense is that many college students don't get it about transfer.  Instead, they cave into the extrinsic motivation provided by the goal of getting good grades in their classes.  This then serves as a justification for much of their study time to be devoted to rote.  Further, it does so in a way where the time devoted to study is manageable.  As I like to tell students, real learning takes as long as it takes.  The deliberate practice with transfer I mentioned in the previous paragraph likely would be rejected by many students as too time consuming.  I wrote about this more than a decade ago in a post called, Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students study to prepare for exams?  Though I don't have any current data on this and my own teaching experience ending after the fall 2019 semester, my guess is that, if anything, the situation is even worse now.  

With college schooling so considered, I want to turn attention to informal learning outside of courses and to formal education at the K-12 level,  or perhaps only the K-5 level, where extrinsic incentives may be weaker or entirely absent (at least one can hope that to be the case).  Is it poor pedagogy that's the problem?  Or does technology detract from the deliberate practice that nascent learners need?  When I was a kid there was both Why Johnny Can't Read? and a view that watching television was making kids illiterate.  So, at this level of abstraction, these questions have been with us for a very long time.  

More recently, technologists and social scientists have gotten together to consider this and related questions.  It's not quite a quarter century ago when John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid published The Social Life of Information.  (An updated version came out in 2017.)  I read the original version a few years after its release, when I was doing campus edtech, and found it a godsend in that it put the emphasis where I thought it should be, on the social practice that the technology induces.  (A few years later in a post called Learning Technology and the "Vision Thing" I referred to this as the Umpire Theory of Technology.  I still subscribe to that today.)  The sociologist Sherry Turkle was more explicit about how the technology blocks the requisite deliberate practice in a New York Times Op-Ed called, Stop Googling. Let's Talk.  

Now I want to get at the word inadvertent in the title of my post.  The discussion above suggests a new technology may have a differential impact on people depending on how far along they are on their own personal learning curve.  Mature learners may react differently than nascent learners.  Do the designers of the technology anticipate this?  If not, this differential reaction is what I mean by inadvertent.  The last time I taught, fall 2019, students who were in the classroom before class started either had their phones out or their laptops out, with the former far more popular.  (There was one iconoclastic student who would have a paper book out.) None of the students tried to engage me in friendly conversation before class.  I have no difficulty asserting that mobile technology has severely limited the deliberate practice that students need at Externalization (the lower left box in the diagram) and it probably has also limited the deliberate practice at Ingest.  

But I'm behind the times.  What about AI in this regard?  I can only guess at its impact.  To date most of what I've read about it is on student cheating and its possible detection on written assignments.  I don't have a good sense how students will use the technology in other contexts.  And I, for one, don't want to banish the technology in favor of pure thought. But I do want to hope that students are getting some important deliberate practice with Reflection, though I fear that even prior to AI many students were not engaged in this way.  

It is hard to know what is going on in someone else's mind.  The best we can do is to engage them in conversation and inquire about that.  The technologists have had their day, and then some.  It's time for the sociologists and the evaluators to take center stage and take their best stab at what's going on.  Maybe some of it will support the cheer-leading for the technology.  But, and this I think is the critical point, the cheerleaders should acknowledge the need for such an effort and accept the results, regardless of what they turn out to be.