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Tech Trade-Off: III. Thinking Differently about Learning

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Click here to read Tech Trade-Off: II. Learning to Think Differently

III. Thinking Differently about Learning

Learning, the singular thing, is generally considered an accumulation of acquired knowledge. We also call it ‘information’, ‘content’, even ‘skill’ – think ‘learning’ as something contained, the only thing left but to bottle and sell it.

Sometimes, you’ll also hear the insipid head-shaker “learnings,” with that plural ‘s’ tacked on the end, which I gather means “lessons” or “wisdom.” I’ve also heard “teachings” used the same way. By this usages, we’re back to a gerunds being the-verbs-that-is-a-nouns, where “students can share their learning(s)” as they might share a refreshing cases of Pepsi-Cola.

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As for being a misconstrued process, someone might attribute to learning a ‘start’ and a ‘finish’, as if sitting down to learn were like sitting down to dine. On the grammar front, I’d simply note how this conception of learning likens the noun to another verb form: the infinitive, i.e. to learn.

Altogether, such a singular concept of learning differs from my own concept of learning… a bit like how apprehension differs from comprehension, where the one is a sense that something is the case while the other is some fuller knowledge about whatever we’re sensing. As the one is more immediate and discrete, at my fingertips, the other transcends and perdures, by contemplation.

For me, learning means something continual, if not continuous – and maybe this is just idiosyncratic to English, somebody let me know. My own conception of learning suggests dynamism, neither the stuff getting bottled nor the bottles themselves, nor even the process of getting stuff into bottles; indeed, the image of filling learners’ minds is a big no-no in education, as is delivering a lesson the way Amazon delivers packages.

How about this… after delivering my daughter to piano lessons, I enjoy a coffee at Tim Horton’s while she and her teacher share 52 keys for sixty minutes. Later on, at home, I enjoy listening while my daughter practises apart from her teacher. During all that time, though, my daughter is learning, each situation helping comprise her whole underway experience of ‘learning piano’.

In her case, that process continued over several years, and I could even imagine it might have ‘begun’, as it were, well before she ever actually sat down next to her teacher – some earlier moment when she felt that inner stirring about even ‘getting to take’ piano lessons. By contrast, once she had begun, at no point did some single ‘part-of-the-whole’ cap off ‘all-that-it-was’. That occurring dynamic, that underway-ness – that process – that, for me, is the gerund of learning.

Image Credits: Taken on Pixabay (Edited)
and Clker-Free-Vector-Images on Pixabay

The gerund, please remember, is the verb-that-is-a-noun, e.g. “Learning takes time and patience.” Yet the gerund can also be part of a predicate verb construction: “I’m still learning to play golf.” This is why Martin Hall keeps devising new and inventive props and drills for practising your golf swing… although, granted, it’s a poor example for those who’ve mastered all 18 holes.

Apart from mastery, the only way I can see to curb any learning process would be some intentional notion to cease learning that particular thing, like when my daughter decided to lift no-longer-willing fingers from the keyboard. Not long after no longer apprehending 52 keys, her comprehension was finding new things to contemplate. Yet, since then, as she’s decided to play piano a little more now and again, so also has her ‘learning piano’ experience re-commenced, albeit in a less formal way.

How about this… a teacher in a classroom steps away from these students over here to visit those students over there. Unlike the piano example, where a student visits the piano teacher, a classroom teacher is the one who circulates, doing their part before stepping away to another table. Yet each time I step away from these students over here to visit those students over there, I must admit, I tend to think I’m simply closing Part I’s laundry door: sure enough, after I step away, the students over here are still chugging along, now learning in my absence, as they were earlier learning in my presence, as they were learning before I arrived.

And in a class of two or three dozen students, plus me – one teacher – I must admit that I depend on learning to be a continuous process. At my best, what I’m really doing is shepherding a process. At my worst, students are left shepherding themselves… which is totally fine if you just want to enjoy playing, but not necessarily if you want to be learning, piano.

How about this… the Solar System is a singular thing, but as a dynamic ‘system’ underway, it has many components, all moving by way of their inter-action: the Sun, each planet, all those moons, all the asteroids and comets, cosmic dust, and even people – everything with mass affecting everything else with mass, all relating continuously, endlessly, while revolving around shared centres of gravity. What better analogy for a classroom full of students and their teacher?

Now you see why teachers bargain for smaller class sizes…
Image Credit (edited): ZCH on Pexels

The misleading conception of learning as a singular event is as if to say, “This is Learning. He’s a gerund.” I just don’t think learning is like this. You can’t save Learning a seat, you can’t buy Learning a green fee, you can’t play Learning a nocturne, and Learning won’t be pouring you a cup of coffee tomorrow morning. Learning isn’t born to live and die because learning isn’t singular or quantifiable or determinate. More importantly, the singular notion of learning as a thing is not only misleading, it’s contrary to education and any possible meaning we might ascribe to ‘the learning process’. Yet how often does any utterance of the word denote this nuance?

Recap:

(a) In apprehending surplus time, I fear we’ve misconstrued the significance of committed time, and I think the resultant surplus mind-set owes at least some debt of thanks to our tendency for shorthanding. And I fear we’re mistaken to dismiss old-man grousing about the way things used to be. The time that has passed, where we’ve come from – going back generations, lifetimes, centuries ago – has left us readied to continue with a frame-of-mind for reduction and abstraction. Even while it’s something we’re learning, I fear it’s something we’ve learned.

(b) As a picture is worth a thousand words, so a word is worth a thousand details, and if words really do matter, so actions are apparently louder still, even when that action is underway up between our ears. As we think, so we do.

So, with a pedantic hat tip to Parts of Speech, let me suggest that we curb our shorthanding and take greater care for ourselves, by way of our thinking. Let’s curb the shorthand notion of learning as a finite event and start recalling learning – like thinking – as an underway process.

And, to be fair, if process can even approach anything like a singular thing, maybe let’s imagine it as time-lapse photography, or those Cracker Jack holograms, where you had to tip the cardboard back-and-forth to move the picture – like CGI, just way more interactive.

As for anyone still arrogant enough to say, “I’m doing the laundry” – go beat your clothes in the creek with a rock.

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Tech Trade-Off: II. Learning to Think Differently

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Click here to read Tech Trade-Off: I. Time to Think Differently

II. Learning to Think Differently

A gerund is a verb that ends with “ -ing.”

Gerunds are a verb form that often function as nouns, indicating some specific ongoing action or process underway, e.g. washing, drying, folding.

Generic gerunds are specified by accompanying words, to help fill in the picture:

“Doing… what exactly? Ohh, doing the laundry.”

At a minimum, we might describe ‘doing the laundry’ as a two-step process, the second being when we turn on the dryer. Some people even add a third step: ‘Folding the laundry’.

But whether specific or generic, gerunds do little to convey any sense of the stages or steps to that ongoing process. If anything, a 2–3 word gerund phrase reduces a series of steps – ‘the ongoing process’ – to ‘a singular thing’ or ‘a discrete event’, e.g. “Doing the laundry is such a chore!”

In Part I, I called this manner of thinking “shorthanding,” as we conceive and describe and reduce multi-step complexities into solely singular events, and I wondered whether innovation, progress, and technology might be having a longer-term influence that reiterates this reductive effect upon our outlook and our thinking…

(a) We develop technology for doing Task ‘A’ so that we don’t have to,
which yields surplus time

(b) We develop an accompanying frame-of-mind, which reinforces itself
more and more with each innovation that comes along

For all its efficiency and time saved, Technology teaches us a commitment to surplus. Think Wall-E and all those people buzzing around the Axiom spaceship in loungewear and e-chairs.

We can depend on A.I.!

Down here, closer to Earth, think ‘Gen AI’ or ‘self-driving cars’.

As we grow more accustomed to the surplus, our accompanying frame-of-mind more readily reconsiders matters of ‘process’ from being a series of steps to being a singular moment or event – this is shorthanding. This feedback loop is training us to think in ways that are more and more accustomed to shorthanding, and on it goes.

All this I’m deliberately claiming informally – it was me who picked the word, “shorthanding,” with zero empirical science to back it up, so…

Sorry, STEM – blame it on STE(A)M, if you like.

And, sure, shorthanding’s a bit abstract and hard to define. For starters, it might be more akin to Pitlick & Gregg than Pitman & Gregg.

Two minutes for… cross-checking?
Image Credit: Public Domain

And language shorthands like this all over the place – look no further than the gerunds and nouns, already mentioned: ‘vacations’, travelling’, living’, life’.

But we’re not simply trading up on Technology for time and convenience, nor on chores and labour for preferred activities. We’re trading in one kind of living for another, by way of a specific manner of who we are and how we live, which is to say by way of how we think. And we appear to have been doing all this without much concern for the price of the trade-off. Whatever that price might be, I suspect we’ve been the ones left short-changed.

For all its marvellous ease, Technology has been feeling more and more to me like a bad habit none of us can resist, and that gets me wondering where else we’re shorthanding. How else have we been altering some ongoing process into a misleading singular notion or concept, like ‘doing the laundry’? And what might be the nuance of such abbreviated shorthand thinking?

One altered concept, I’m afraid, is the process of ‘learning’.

Image Credit: Gerd Altmann on Pixabay

Click here to read Tech Trade-Off: III. Thinking Differently about Learning

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Tech Trade-Off: I. Time to Think Differently

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“Tech [Anything]” grabs attention these days, so don’t be too miffed once you start reading because this is me literally giving it away inside thirty words.

I. Time to Think Differently

Fill the washing machine, add some detergent, set the dial, and push ‘Start’.

It’s a 25min cycle… now, why not grab a coffee, or something to read…

Technology is a marvel… and if there’s one benefit we enjoy, thanks to Technology, you’d have to think it’s surplus time. Take that laundry off your hands, and all that time’s now on your hands.

So close that door behind you, and grab that coffee, and something to read – after all… you are, technically, still ‘doing the laundry’ – we all respect that… why else even invent a washing machine? Listen closely, behind that closed door: can you hear it? That little machine chugging merrily along, doing the laundry while you slip away, guilt-free!

Like I said: Technology is a marvel.

Photo Credit: Emmanuel Ikwuegbu on Unsplash

And only a fool would disagree – next time you find yourself faced with doing the laundry, just weigh your surplus time against all that hand-wringing labour … unless, of course, you prefer leaning over a washtub down by the creek, or beating your clothes with a rock.

From delicate hands Technology lifts all the toil we prefer to avoid, and in the process, what we learn while ‘doing the laundry’ is how surplus time is the expectation we once never knew we couldn’t live without. Listen more closely, behind that door, and what you’ll hear is not the intrepid little washing machine but the sterile drone of some finger-raw laundry fool processing their foolish foolishness. But you’re nobody’s fool – you set that dial and went to grab a coffee, and owned that fool in the process.

We seem to shorthand a lot of things this way – or, rather – we seem to invent a lot of Technology that shorthands things for us by compressing something lengthier into a more singular ‘process’… whatever took time over several steps to complete, now just a mere leap ‘from there to there’.

We also seem to talk this way – or, rather – we seem to think this way. For instance, you’ll hear people shorthand their vacation: “We did the Louvre, did the Eiffel Tower, did the whole Paris thing…”

And hey, when you only visit a few days, that means squeezing in as much Paris as you can while you can because, like any process, that ‘vacation’ you start will eventually be coming to an end. Added bonus: back home, when someone asks, “How was your vacation?” you can shorthand the whole trip with that cool touch of insouciance about all the places you “did.”

Photo Credit (edited): Margarida Louro on Unsplash

And sure, maybe this shorthanding is a checklist mentality bereft of politesse, but for anyone who really knows, an embrace of surplus is a sophisticated taste grown accustomed to efficiency. Besides, it wasn’t just anybody who “did Paris,” was it? As they would say in the City of Light: “Comme tu penses, donc tu es.” They’d say it fluently, of course.

As for this post, I’ll grant that a two-sentence leap from laundry to the Louvre is a little abrupt. But if you’re struggling to spot the Technology thread in this Paris bit, that is sort of the point.

Beyond e-devices and microprocessors and the digital stuff typically considered these days to be Technology, think about process and all the simultaneous design and infrastructure we simply take for granted… I mean beyond obvious stuff, like WiFi and satellite communications, or fibre optic networks and transmission towers, or even jet engines and global travel. Think way back. Think like that fish who suddenly notices all the water… but this time, instead of noticing the water, notice how long you’ve been immersed in it.

Take Paris trips and leisure time. Take the whole concept of ‘vacation’, for being a great example of technological surplus. For one thing, ‘vacation’ now means it’s not ironic that hotels, restaurants, and tourism have become an industry unto themselves.

Think past museums and exhibits and architecture… magnificent towers, world cities, global infrastructure… stable governments, world commerce, industrial agriculture, economies of scale… think past all that and, instead, think how all that stuff has developed really gradually over a long, long, long, long time. A long time. Centuries, I mean – not days.

Think how all that stuff had to be rethunk and revised and rebuilt again and again and again through multiple versions and earlier forms in how-many-other-places across Planet Earth – so, think ‘actual history’, the process of life underway. If you can, even think back further than the 21st century – ikr!

Think of the manner by which all our Technology has been developed and refined in dozens of countries by gazillions of people over centuries of accidents and mistakes and trial and error and serendipity. Think about all the discovery and extraction and refinement of raw materials for manufacturing, and all the supply chains that had to be invented from scratch to keep it all circulating, and all the sales and retail and finance that were established, not just to keep all those things viable but supplied and chained in order to be sustained. And think about all the years and decades and centuries of time during which all this came to be. Think about another way to conceive of “technology” – think not “tech” but “-ology” – and think at least once-removed from 21st century glee. As opposed to surplus time, think committed time. Think historical time and geographical time (which would be time- and place-time). If possible, think about all this stuff from any perspective that is beyond your own.

Oh, and think with no defined horizon, no particular pinpoint. As each ‘present moment’ arrives, and moves on, then arrives again, and then again moves on… think process in its most literal ongoing expression: think always now, with due respect for both memory and foresight. Stop thinking about what process means, and start thinking what process is.

All this is probably a lot to think about, but we are nearly done thinking: think how submerged we are in technology, innovation, progress, and euphoria, and commerce and growth and leisure, and the way things are, and the way we want them to be, and the way we’re accustomed to all of them being, all at once even if not all in concert.

… or, failing all that, at least think of our taste for efficiency and our commitment to surplus.

Recap:

(a) Time spent on process? Not on my watch!

… yet for misconstruing ‘steps in a process’ as ‘short-lived times spent on innumerable single events’, each shorthanded process gradually changes our outlook from ‘means as means’ to ‘means becoming ends in themselves’

(b) Eureka! Time saved by technology!

… yet for gradual changes to our outlook, ‘surplus time’ has a real effect upon our thinking and, thereby, upon our decisions and behaviour

What I hear called Technology someone else might call “innovation” or “advancement,” or someone else might critique as “progress.” “Pioneering,” “state of the art,” “cutting edge” – all these, also, to the point: as we stake claims of ownership for words and concepts, that seems pretty telling as to how immersed we are, living inside all this. Or maybe better to say how all this lives inside us. And the more immersed it is, the more feverish our yammering becomes: “next level,” “über-sophisticated,” “transcendent.”

We’re soaking in ourselves, it seems, and maybe it’s time for a rinse. And thus do we find our way, in the space of two sentences, back to doing the laundry.

Click here to read Tech Trade-Off: II. Learning to Think Differently

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