— S e b l o g g i n g

“Proactively helping to shape the third digital revolution will require nothing less than a culture change in the social sciences. The dominant “positive” social science approach, which is one of path observation, will need to expand to include a much more extensive application of the “normative” approach. Positive social science focuses on explaining what has happened. A normative approach includes views on what should happen. It still must be grounded in evidence, including a clear understanding of the underlying science and the technology. By itself, normative work is often disparaged as not being science—though there are dedicated subcultures committed to what is variously termed action research, participant observation, and similar approaches. It is possible, indeed essential, to combine the positive and normative approaches by embracing and advancing bold, evidence-based analysis of accelerating technological developments and desired transformations.

The third digital revolution provides social science with a rare opportunity to engage with emerging new technologies while they are still in formation. It is a chance to look around the corner into the future implications across the many fields and disciplines—economics, sociology, political science, management science, industrial relations, and others. This will require the social sciences to shift into a more proactive stance to become path creators, not just path observers.”

Gershenfeld, N., Gershenfeld, A., & Cutcher-Gershenfeld, J. (2017). Designing Reality. New York, Basic Books.

“The essence of education is not to transfer knowledge; it is to guide the learning process, to put responsibility for study into the students—own hands. It is not the piecemeal merchandising of information; it is the bestowal of keys that allow people to unlock the vault of knowledge on their own. It does not consist of pilfering the intellectual property amassed by others through no additional effort of one’s own; it would rather place people on their own path of discovery and invention.”

Tsunesaburo Makiguchi

“The unequal treatment of our language of the arts of learning and of teaching is visible in grammar as well as in vocabulary. Think, for example, of parsing the sentence, “The teacher teaches a child.” Teacher is he active subject of the sentence; child is the passive object. The teacher does something to the learner. This grammatical form bears the stamp of school’s hierarchical ideology in representing the teaching as the active process. The teacher is in control and is therefore the one who needs skill; the learner simply has to obey instructions. This asymmetry is so deeply rooted that even the advocates of “active” or “constructivist” education find it hard to escape. There are many books and courses on the art of constructivist teaching, that talk about the art of of setting up situations in which the learner will “construct knowledge”; but I do not know of any books on what I would assume to be the more difficult art of actually constructing knowledge. The how-to-do-it literature in the constructivist subculture is almost as strongly biased to the teacher side as it is in the instructionist subculture” (p-10).

Papert, S. (1996). A word for learning. In Y. Kafai, Y. & M. Resnick (Eds.), Constructionism in practice (pp. 9-24). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

“No paradigm is ever able to imagine the next one. It’s almost impossible for one paradigm to imagine that there will even be a next one. The people of the Middle Ages didn’t think of themselves as being in the “middle” of anything at all. As far as they were concerned, the way they were living was the way people would be living till the end of time. Even if you’d managed to persuade them that a new era was just around the corner, they would’ve been unable to tell you a single thing about it—and in particular they wouldn’t have been able to tell you what was going to make it new. If they’d been able to describe the Renaissance in the fourteenth century, it would have been the Renaissance.

We’re no different. For all our blather of new paradigms and emerging paradigms, it’s an unassailable assumption among us that our distant descendants will be just exactly like us. Their gadgets, fashions, music, and so on, will surely be different, but we’re confident that their mindset will be identical—because we can imagine no other mindset for people to have. But in fact, if we actually manage to survive here, it will be because we’ve moved into a new era as different from ours as the Renaissance was from the Middle Ages—and as unimaginable to us as the Renaissance was to the Middle Ages.”

Quinn, D. (1999). Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s next big adventure. New York, River Press.

“In the framework of the technocratic interpretation of the information society, the computer technology of self-education looks different. Because technical progress and the priority of technology in all spheres of life activity (including spiritual and intellectual life) are bringing it about that humans are coming to resemble machines, functioning according to the law of efficiency and rationalizing human relations to the maximum, under the conditions of the information society self-education portends the loss of personal identity, reducing the individual to a set of roles in the system of the production, exchange, and use of knowledge” (p.76).

Shuklina, E. A. (2001). Technologies of self-education. Russian Education and Society, 43(2), 57-78.