Almost done the edits for an upcoming chapter (co-authored with my supervisor, Stephen Petrina), titled, Hacking Minds: Curriculum Mentis, Noosphere, Internet, Matrix, Web in the book Hacking Education in a Digital Age: Teacher Education, Curriculum, and Literacies (Editors: Nicholas Ng-A-Fook, Sarah Pratt, Bryan Smith, and Linda Radford)
You can find our current draft HERE.
Posted in Publication, Technology, Theology
[image from makered.org]
In June 2014, President Obama’s Nation of Makers initiative was launched and has resulted in the White House hosting a Maker Faire and the declaration of June 17-23, 2016 (THIS WEEK) as The National Week of Making. Maker Education emphasizes a multidisciplinary model of education that respects all subject areas in both academic and vocational education, evolving the tradition of a general education through making and creating with technology.
Posted in maker culture
This past weekend, on Mar 19, I had the privilege to share a paper at the Philosophy of Education Society 72nd Annual Meeting. The theme this year is: Philosophy of Education in the Gap between Past and Future. The phrase comes from Hannah Arendt’s preface to Between Past and Future which challenges our understanding of sustained thinking in the hopes of redirecting educational thinking, policy and practice. In that vein, I wrote a paper, Discerning a temporal philosophy of education: Understanding the gap between past and future through Augustine, Heidegger, and Huebner.
Here’s the introduction:
Over forty years ago, Dwayne Huebner began questioning “the hegemony of the notion of ‘learning’ in education”[i] and found an “overvaluing of scientific language.”[ii] This privileging of the modes and methods of educational psychology or “concept-empiricism”[iii] enables the self-promotion of learning, and in turn, relegates teaching to a mere function of learning in education. For Huebner, this matter of “learning” imposes “technical pseudo-scientific language”[iv] onto education, which exemplifies the challenge of language and its role in educational praxis. The curricular field is still largely obsessed with teaching metrics, programmed learning outcomes, and school objectives which are produced in advance of the lived experiences of students within an educational framework. These mechanized values point to an inauthentic understanding of time due to a curricular and pedagogical orientation built on a determinate and preordained educational future. For Huebner, subjugating education under the auspice of learning is problematic as it diminishes the essence of our being into a very narrow condition.[v] To subsume our beingness within a framework of learning entails a philosophy of education directed by epistemological considerations to the preclusion of ontological concerns. Instead, this paper seeks to demonstrate an understanding of temporality as a way to critique the standard language of learning and create a discourse about authentic learning. Following Huebner, we note that his educational philosophy is inspired by Heidegger and the phenomena of temporality and historicity. In turn, Heidegger’s understanding of time is largely developed from his study of Augustine. This paper, then, traces the conceptualization of temporality through the trinity of Huebner, Heidegger, and Augustine. Accordingly, one way to understand the “gap between past and future”[vi] is to conceive of authentic learning within the existential-phenomenological tradition by discerning a temporal understanding of life that advocates for our ontological potentialities and possibilities as human beings.
[i] Ted T. Aoki, “Signs of Vitality in Curriculum Scholarship,” in Curriculum in a New Key, eds. William F. Pinar and Rita L. Irwin (New York: Routledge, [1985] 2005), 230).
[ii] Dwayne E. Huebner, “New Modes of Man’s Relationship to Man,” in The Lure of the Transcendent: Collected Essays by Dwayne E. Huebner, ed. Vikki Hillis (New York: Routledge, [1963] 2008), 87.
[iii] William F. Pinar, “The Reconceptualization of Curriculum Studies,” in The Curriculum Studies Reader, eds. David Flinders and Stephen Thornton (New York: Routledge, 2009), 171.
[iv] William F. Pinar, “Introduction,” in The Lure of the Transcendent: Collected Essays by Dwayne E. Huebner, ed. Vikki Hillis (New York: Routledge, 2008), xxii.
[v] Dwayne E. Huebner, “The Capacity for Wonder and Education,” in The Lure of the Transcendent: Collected Essays by Dwayne E. Huebner, ed. Vikki Hillis (New York: Routledge, [1959] 2008), 6.
[vi] Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), 13.
Posted in Conference, Presentation
My working thesis, so far, is titled Designing technotheologies: Ethics, pedagogies, and spiritualities in maker actor-networks. In essence, my focus is to understand how religion or spirituality matter in the consumer use, design and engineering of media and technology. My research is aiming to distinguish how religion and spirituality contribute to ethical know-how in this area. In order to discern values and ethics throughout the design process, I am situating my research in the DIY community, maker culture, and hacker space.
Which is why, this past weekend, I went to Seattle to conduct research at Code for the Kingdom Seattle.
According to their website, Code for the Kingdom is described as: “A hackathon movement igniting the Christian passion and purpose of technologists and entrepreneurs to innovate culture shaping technologies that would reclaim our times for the Gospel”.
Hackathons are events where technologists collaborate for a set period of time on various software projects. These events are regular phenomenon in computer related workplaces and studies, yet there has never been a direct link to religiosity until the development of organizations such as Code for the Kingdom.
Code for the Kingdom specifically addresses the intersection of technology and theology through the medium of the hackathon. A more detailed description of their purpose as found on the website:
Code for the Kingdom is a weekend hackathon and ongoing ecosystem where global issues are tackled from a Christian perspective.
Join an incredible group of individuals who are applying their skills and experiences to advance common good and serve God’s Kingdom. In collaboration with innovative nonprofits and churches, we’ll write code and create technology to help release the oppressed, teach God’s Word, heal the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and support the church and the body of Christ.
Make a difference by writing much-needed code or designing beautiful interfaces. Find a community of peers who want to have fun while serving the Lord.
Code for the Kingdom is a new technological-theological phenomenon that I am hoping to capture in more detail as part of my research. I will report more details from my experience this past weekend in Seattle in the next post.
Posted in Research, Technology, Theology
I am pleased to share that I will be presenting papers at two different conferences.
First, I will be heading down to Chicago for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting (April 16-20). It is the largest education conference in North America and I’m delighted to be presenting a paper for the ‘Spirituality & Education’ Special Interest Group. The paper is titled, Understanding Curriculum as Techno-Theological Text. Here’s the abstract:
This paper is based on the writings of Ted Aoki, the Japanese-Canadian scholar at the forefront of the re-conceptualized movement within curriculum theory. One possibility implied in Aoki’s work is inhabiting the space in-between technology and theology. As Aoki might ask: how we can linger on the bridge between technology and theology? The purpose of using the bridge metaphor, is to bridge technology and theology, to discern curriculum as techno-theological text. A reframing of this question is whether we can be in a mode of technology without defaulting into instrumentalization. This paper, then, is an attempt at making sense the multiple ways in which the words technology and theology can be understood within an Aokian framework.
I’ve been developing the ideas of curriculum as technotheology for awhile, and Ted Aoki is a wonderful curriculum theorist who speaks into both the theological and the technological. Hopefully I will get some constructive feedback and some great discussion. If you’re down at AERA, my session is on Thursday, April 16, 12-1:30pm at the Hyatt, West Tower – Green Level, Crystal B. For more info, go to this link.
In May, I will be participating in a 2-day symposium on the Significance of Study, held at UBC. I will be acting as a discussant, responding to Alan Block, Professor from the University of Wisconsin, who will be reading from a paper, titled, Study as sacred. I am excited for this opportunity as Block has written in the area of religion, theology, and education. For more info, here’s the website.
Posted in Conference, Presentation, Technology, Theology
I had the privilege of participating in the CACS 7th Biennial Provoking Curriculum Conference at UBC. As indicated by the title of the conference, the purpose was to provoke curriculum studies by attending to the multiple denotations of provoke: to stimulate, arouse, elicit, induce, excite, kindle, generate, instigate, goad, prick, sting, prod, infuriate, madden, ruffle, stir, and inflame.
The first day, our ‘How We Learn‘ research team presented a panel discussion about Design Based Research (DBR). The abstract is as follows:
In the second decade of the 21st century, to ask the question “how do we learn?” is to ask questions of “how we learn media and technology across the lifespan” (HWL). Formal educational systems are challenged by 21st century learning while researchers are challenged to document cognitive implications of new media and technologies. Over the past decade, our research program has empirically explored problems of learning media and technology across the lifespan. Our field and lab investigations focus on the problem of how (not whether) new media and technologies affect learning across the lifespan. With a core of graduate students, our research team has been immensely productive and original in reconceptualizing cognition, learning, media, technology, and their interdependencies with curriculum. This panel focuses on Design-Based Research (DBR) 2.0 methodologies.
The key objectives of this panel are 1) to profile methodological advancements and insights in DBR derived from lab and field-based studies; 2) to prompt discussion on DBR in context of new technologies and the design turn in DIY or maker culture. Providing empirical examples, this symposium introduces advancements in DBR and connects interest in DBR with understandings of design and engineering cognition. The format will be conversational and demonstrative, beginning with a series of focus questions to generate interest and audience discussion. A series of demonstrations of DBR will be provided as examples and to provide depth of understanding. The overall goal is to provoke new understandings of methodology in context of design-based research 2.0 into curriculum, media, technology and learning.
The second presentation consisted of Dr Stephen Petrina, Dr Franc Feng, and myself, speaking about the intersection of technology, theology, and curriculum. The description of our presentation is as follows:
In many ways, curriculum, technology, and theology emerge coincidentally or contemporaneously within Homer, specifically within the Iliad and Odyssey. The three are somewhat conceptually interrelated in Homer and subsequently Hesiod. In Homer, the concepts, practices and words are given their ancient meanings. Medieval and modern derivatives and meanings are in some ways are quite similar and in other ways distinct from ancient Homeric and Platonic uses. Our premise is that curriculum, technology and theology are co-emergent— mutually interdependent. We do not have one without the others. This is not merely semantics. By acknowledging these interdependencies we can begin to provoke and understand curriculum anew.
This panel provides three perspectives and papers on TechnoTheoCurriculum. The first paper, “On the History and Metaphysics of Curriculum,” describes ancient encounters with curriculum, technology, and theology as they co-emerge. Inasmuch curriculum refers to the loneliness of the long distance runner, it also refers to the Circum Maximum, Maxime Circe, or the Circus Maximus, referencing chariots and conjuring up a complex technotheological infrastructure. The second paper, “Understanding Curriculum as Technotheological Text,” provides a history of a late medieval and early modern re-emergence of curriculum and technology in a Protestant and Calvinist culture at the hands of Peter Ramus. This paper traces Ramist interdependencies of curriculum, technology, and theology through the seventeenth century in the work of William Ames and technometry. The third paper, “On the History of Hermeneutic Techniques,” traces a circle from twenty-first century understandings of curriculum, technology and theology through Augustine’s City of God.
And finally, just for fun, here’s a timelapse video of our technotheocurriculum session.
Posted in Methodology, Presentation, Technology, Theology
Religion’s just a technology. How the hardware of humanity gets used will depend on the software – Irwin Kula
In a Time article, titled, This is Why Religion is Just a Technology (published July 25, 2014), I was first introduced to Irwin Kula, an eighth generation Rabbi. The article would introduce Kula, a progressive Rabbi who would be among the speakers at the BIF – a Business Innovation Factory conference.
In the TIME article, Kula asks, “what would happen if we applied innovation theory to religion, to compress the resources it takes to create good people?” In his talk, Kula explains how he is going about researching this questions. He is conducting a study on religious traditions in America where people are asked “what is the actual impact on the user” and “what is the actual impact on the person in their life.” His research questions include, will gratitude increase? Will hope increase? Will a sense of belonging increase? Kula’s research should appear in a peer reviewed article in Jan/Feb 2015 which would have implications for the business model and pedagogical model of religious practices, as he is attempting an empirical analysis into his definition of human flourishing.
As Kula is speaking to a business audience, he suggests the development of “accountability technologies” as there is no more God in the sky as the overarching seeing eye may be replaced by the technological surveillance eye, or perhaps a spiritual sense of inner seeing eye, being accountable to our communities.
While Kula’s research is indeed interesting and merits further investigation, his ‘practical suggestions’ and general posture seem to veer towards what David Noble calls, the religion of technology. It may be that his research is perpetuating the religious fervour for a technological utopia which may include spiritual rituals mediated through accountability technologies. Of course, this discussion would be greatly clarified and further enhanced once his research article comes out and his notion of human flourishing is clarified.
Posted in Technology, Theology
I’m happy to share that I will be presenting at RESEARCH STORIES: A Graduate Forum. This is part of the UBC Year of Research in Education initiative for 2014-2015.
My presentation is titled, Designing things, practices and concerns for the good life.
Here’s the abstract:
This research examines the complex relationship between design, the sacred and online learning, framed by matters of concern. It is the culmination of a yearlong ethnographic research project in the lives of Christian undergraduate students in Vancouver. Focal concerns in the form of things and practices have disclosive power if they are designed for the good life. The task of the designer, then, is to purposefully move away from matters of fact towards matters of concern. The interviews were open-ended and based on a loosely structured set of questions about faith background, Internet usage, online spiritual experiences, and other factors. Conversations and participant observations were then analyzed as matters of concern.
Posted in Presentation
As TED continues its proliferation of offering content related to technology, entertainment, and design, its newest booklet, The art of stillness, ventures into areas of the technotheological. Below is the trailer for the book, written by Pico Iyer:
In an article published by TED, titled, Why we need a secular sabbath, Iyer outlines the core concept of his book – that there is an urgent need to slow down, to rest, to find sabbath in our lives. He notes that many businesses, particularly tech companies such as Google have created spaces, schedules, and/or work cultures to promote mindful rest. Intel experimented with a ‘quiet period’ of four hours every tuesday, in which all engineers and managers were to refrain from e-mails, phones, and meetings for four hours, creating space for ‘thinking time.’ General Mills has meditation rooms throughout its campuses. Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired magazine) and many others in Silicon Valley practice an “internet sabbath” every week.
These practices of rest seem to draw from the religiously abundant practices of rest, meditation, prayer, and sabbath. Iver himself, connects these modern practices of rest to the ancient ones of sabbath in the Judeo-Christian tradition. He rightly points to the book of Numbers, which outlintes the boundaries of sabbath, because the sabbath is holy. Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish theologian would say that in sabbath, we find “a cathedral in time rather than in space.”
How then, can Iyer limit the sabbath to a secular time and space?
One reading of Iyer may be to limit practical forms of sabbath by removing all connections to the religious or spiritual. The case of transcendental meditation (TM), a form of mantra meditation, offers an example of just how complicated it may be to claim such practices as religious or non-religious. While many of its practitioners claim TM is non-religious, it “unsuccessfully fought a legal action to defend itself from being declared a religion in New Jersey” (Wallis, 2003, p.54).
The secular thesis merits further study as, in this case, it co-opts the religious practice of sabbath rest and delimits secular boundaries for the general populous. One voice to consider is Charles Taylor, who describes the secular as a theological distinction which privatizes transcendent experiences, redefines belief, or making unbelief in religion a possible reality (Taylor, 2007, p. 3). Secularization, for Taylor, is therefore a theological construct with its own conditions of belief, as one among many new religious subjectivities in the modern world that is characterized as individual spiritual fulfillment of the self (Taylor, 2007, pp. 508-510). This privatization may be another way to read Iyer, in that sabbath practices are necessary for all, yet forced to the private sphere.
We continue to wonder, to ask, to reflect on how the idea/belief/practice/enactment of sabbath has become a secular sabbath? Or at least, how did Iyer come to frame his book with this particular narrative? This story is further complicated with other actors and actants: TED, Kevin Kelly, e-mail, Google, the Bible, God, Sabbath, sabbath, sabbath-ing, and sabbath-ness.
While this can immediately be framed as an ANT problem, I am thinking, a way to go about this issue is from Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), questioning and problematizing the daily routines and subjective well-being of those who practice a form of sabbath keeping. In this way, perhaps some data can emerge within this network of the technotheological.
Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wallis, R. (2003). Three types of new religious movement. In L. L. Dawson (Ed.), Cults and new religious movements: A reader (pp. 36-58). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Donna Haraway (1991) observed that she “would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (p. 181). However, John Law (2004) in After method: Mess in social science research believes we do not have to make such a choice. They are different “goods” enacted together and condensed at particular moments, while partially separated at other times. For Law, this is part of his methodology, or his method assemblage:
generally, the process of crafting and enacting the necessary boundaries between presence, manifest absence and Otherness. Method assemblage is generative or performative, producing absence and presence. More specifically, it is the crafting or bundling of relations in three parts: (a) whatever is in-here or present (for instance a representation or an object); (b) whatever is absent but also manifest (that is, it can be seen, is described, is manifestly relevant to presence); and (c) whatever is absent but is Other because, while necessary to presence, it is also hidden, repressed or uninteresting. Presence may take the form of depictions (representational and/or allegorical) or objects. Manifest absence may take the form of a reality out-there that is represented, or the relevant context for an object. Method assemblage is distinguished from assemblage in the priority attached to the generation of presence. The definition by itself is symmetrical, telling us nothing about the form taken by presence, absence, or the relations between these. A further provisional definition of method assemblage is offered in Chapter 2. Here it is treated as the enactment of a bundle of ramifying relations that generate representations in-here and represented realities out-there. This is a special case of the more general definition above. (Law, 2004, p. 161)
For Law, there are a multitude of goods generated by method assemblages. This means ‘truth’ is no longer the only arbiter, not the only good. Politics as a good, for instance, is about how to achieve better social and non-social arrangements, in which we can judge its products politically. Certain things can be made more political. Similarly, there is the good of aesthetics. What counts as beauty can be arranged more probable, or stronger, or made more real.
In this post, we are particularly interested in the spiritual as a good. Law offers two case studies of the spiritual: Quakers and the Australian Aborigines. They offer a glimpse into a world “permeated by the spiritual, and who participate in assemblages that enact its realities” (p. 150). Their spiritualities, or using Law’s terminology, inspirations, suggest three considerations. First, like the other goods of truth and politics, we cannot insist that they are the only goods, else this becomes spiritual reductionism/religious fundamentalism. Second, these spiritualities/inspirations are enacted in their specific contexts and cannot/should not be generalized across all of the spiritual. Third, we must consider whether these goods would, should, or always must be enacted. Instead, there is a temporal, or partial connection in this fractal view of world-making that re-orders the world.
For Law, method as we understood it (from a Euro-American perspective) has created a duality in which much is hidden, or becomes Othered into a kind of hinterland. Instead, his conceptualizing of multiple goods allow for different partially connected goods to be made and remade. Truths and politics, aesthetics, and spiritualities “are variously woven together and condensed at particular moments, and partially separated at others” (p. 151). The suggested image is one of choreography, a dance, or of weaving. And so, Law responding to Haraway’s observation about choosing the good of cyborg over that of a goddess, will suggest that both goods are found in this great dance, partially connecting and separating at times, enacting alternative methods that is more generous, more modest, and perhaps more technological AND spiritual at the same time.
References
Haraway, D. J. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In D. J. Haraway (Ed.), Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (pp. 149-181). London: Free Association Books.
Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. New York, NY: Routledge.
Posted in Actor-Network Theory, Methodology, Technology, Theology
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