Hey everyone,
Let me know what you think about the below. For me, this is some pretty exciting stuff!
Here’s an article I found pertinent to our current readings (especially Ong). I also see this tying in with Vygotskian theory. Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist/educational theorist who postulated that “tools,” both physical and mental (e.g., modeling), are social and language based.
Language may have emerged when our ancestors worked on stone tools, according to this article.
Technology begot language begets more technology. In this theory, language and technology are reflexively linked and teaching figures predominantly. Here we have exactly the things we’re studying: technology, language, and education. As an aside, this is also intimately related to artificial intelligence on multiple levels (e.g., AI as a technology, as an intelligence, as an educator unto itself).
“Somewhere on the timeline between the long run of the Oldowan and the more rapid rise of Acheulean technologies, language (or what’s often called protolanguage) likely made its first appearance. Oren Kolodny and his co-author, Shimon Edelman, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, say the overlap is not a coincidence. Rather, they theorize, the emergence of language was predicated on our ancestors’ ability to perform sequence-dependent processes, including the production of complex tools.
Kolodny’s arguments build off the groundbreaking experiments of Dietrich Stout, an anthropologist at Emory University. A flintknapper himself, Stout has taught hundreds of students how to make Acheulean-era tools, and he’s tracked their brain activity during the learning process. Stout found that his students’ white matter—or the neural connectivity in their brains—increased as they gained competence in flintknapping. His research suggests that producing complex tools spurred an increase in brain size and other aspects of hominin evolution, including—perhaps—the emergence of language.
But language couldn’t just pop out fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. “Every evolutionary process, including the evolution of language, has to be incremental and composed of small steps, each of which independently needs to be beneficial,” Kolodny explains. Teaching, he says, was a crucial part of the process. When hominins like Homo ergaster and Homo erectus taught their close relatives how to make complex tools, they worked their way into an ever more specialized cultural niche, with evolutionary advantage going to those individuals who were not only adept at making and using complex tools, but who were also able—at the same time—to communicate in more and more sophisticated ways.”
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/toolmaking-language-brain/562385/
