Hermeneutic Heretic

Bearing witness to a teacher’s task - The Boston Globe

Many people believe they know what makes effective schools because they have attended school. This is akin to saying I am a physician because I’ve been in a hospital. I challenge any of this group to spend a week teaching in a public school classroom, exam schools excluded. There, they may attempt to carry out curriculum policies fashioned by politicians while simultaneously managing a group with varied cognitive abilities, language abilities, behavior issues, and family support.

This irate letter to the editor makes an interesting point. Much of the debate around education is based on images of schooling. Some of them based on the fact that the writer ‘has gone to school’ others on popular culture scripts or, more frequently, blends of the two. This is further peppered by folk theories of learning and the cummulative effect of this learning on the larger group (society).

Of course, that is the first part (italicized by me) - a process which I’ve recently started calling frame negotiation. The second part invites the critics (and by rhetorical proxy the readers/public) to join in the creation of other conceptual images and scripts that are competing with those identified by the author as harmful.

And then there is the third part that anyone interested in educational reform might want to ponder. All educational activities (including or especially reform) carry a certain logistical/transactional burden which (like a rope to the moon) also needs to be included in the process (carry its own weight). That is the source of quite a bit of cognitive dissonance in educational debates.

The Books Google Could Open

The nation’s colleges and universities should support Google’s controversial project to digitize great libraries and offer books online. It has the potential to do a lot of good for higher education in this country.
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This powerful tool will make less well-known written works or hard-to-find research materials more accessible to students, teachers and others around the world. Geography will not hinder a student’s quest to find relevant material. Libraries can help to revive interest in underused books. And sales of books would probably increase as a result.

Book Search comes at a time when college and university libraries are hard-pressed to keep up with the publishing and technology revolutions. Budgets are stretched, and libraries must now specialize and rely on interlibrary loans for books in other subjects.

Student and faculty research has also been limited by what is on the shelves of campus libraries. A student can identify a book through an online library catalogue, but the book’s content remains unknown. It must then be shipped — an expense that may not be worthwhile if the book isn’t what was expected.

With Book Search, it’s easy to imagine a history student at a small college in Nebraska using the Internet to find an out-of-print book held only by a library in New York. Instead of requesting delivery of the book, he or she can read a snippet of it from Google’s online catalogue and request it on interlibrary loan if it seems useful. Even better, the student can purchase the book in the same session at the computer.

This is a great example of how analogical reasoning (or the scenario part of conceptual frames/cognitive models) plays out in policy making. The whole article is leads up to the last paragraph (my emphasis) where a little story is told to illustrate the “trasnformative power” of a simple move in education. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love google books and it would certainly make research much easier for me. However, there’s more than a good chance that higher education will scarcely be affected by this - there is absolutely no element in the story that would describe the potential cumulative effect of many such students in Nebraska on the system of education as a whole. There isn’t even a mention of how representative such a student in Nebraska is of the entire college student population or (more importantly) what motivation led him or her to a search for an out of print book or how likely he or she would be to actually purchase.

Similar reasoning can be found behind the recently popular Long Tail idea.

NPR : Roundtable: The Future of Jazz Radio
News & Notes with Ed Gordon, August 10, 2006 · Some experts say the jazz radio format is in crisis. Some of the few stations devoted to jazz may soon change format. Guests: Suzan Jenkins, president of Jazz Alliance International, an industry group; Tom Thomas, president of the public radio research firm Station Resource Group; and Don Heckman, jazz critic for the Los Angeles Times.

As a lapsed structuralist I like terms such as “functional equivalence”.  (For instance, I like the one I read in Dianne Ravinovich that divorce has become the functional equivalent to death.) Another one came to mind when I started listening to NPR podcasts in addition to my beloved BBC Radio 4. The one thing I really like about the NPR is its theme tunes which seem to feature a lot of great jazz where the BBC (or other equivalent radio stations - I know the Czech ones) would have a classical piece (of course, both use pop and rock, as well). Now, this is purely an impression, I’m too lazy to back it up by actually doing research but the conclusion I’m forced to reach is that in the US jazz is the functional cultural equivalent to classical music in Europe. That is, it is a province of educated (older) people and it has a patina of respectability. This  discussion on the future of jazz radio is a case in point reminiscent as it is of a number of moans by European intellectuals about the decline of interest in classical music.

There is a broader issue here, though. And it is one of functional equivalence across cultures. What conclusions can we draw from this? Probably the one that we will probably find certain functions present in cultures of certain complexity. However, there is neither a relativist nor a universalist point being made here, seductive though it may be. This functional equivalence in no way pre-determines individuals to given musical tastes - and furthermore an American of an appropriate class residing in Europe is unlikely to switch to classical music just to blend in. But it does mean that certain patterns of prestige (some would say power) are inevitable with regard to prevalent artifacts.

On The Media– I Know You Are But What Am I?
SHANKAR VEDANTAM: [The study] just showed six television clips of the conflict to 144 observers, some of whom were pro-Israeli and some of whom were pro-Arab and some of whom were neutral.

And pro-Israelis found that the clips had an astonishing number of anti-Israel references and the pro-Arabs found the very same clips had a huge number of anti-Arab references, so partisans were able to look at the exact same clips and draw diametrically opposing conclusions about them.

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The more informed people were, the more likely their assessments of the television news clips were diametrically opposing. And the interesting thing is that what’s animating this difference in perception is the fear among both pro-Israelis and pro-Arabs that neutrals will gravitate to the other side. And the data shows that in this, they’re actually misguided.

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what happens is when journalists cover daily news events, what they do is they write about, you know, whatever happened the previous day. And what partisans want is they want far more than just what happened the previous day. They want all of the context, and usually the context that they want is somewhat selective, but they want the context that essentially justifies whatever happened the previous day from their point of view.

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So long as reporters are trying to describe both sides, it is inevitable that they’re going to run into conflict with both sides. And one of the ironic things when these conflicts break out is pretty much the only thing that partisans on both sides will agree on is that the media is biased against them.

BOB GARFIELD: So even if every story on the Mideast were accompanied by historical context in eight volumes, the partisans would never be mollified.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: I think so, because I think context for an Israeli is something different than context for an Arab, precisely in the way that you just laid out. So the reasons people come to particular points of view is that they are aware of, you know, the historical context and they are aware of all of the things that might have led up to that particular moment in the conflict. The person on the other side has a whole litany of events that lead up to their own perception of whatever happened yesterday.

This seems pretty much like a description of what has come to be known as framing or the use of cognitive models. It raises two interesting questions:

1. What is the actual cognitive process behind this rather anecdotal description of what I would call frame entrenchment and online frame processing (blending).

2. Is there a practical implication for recipients of news? The story seems to conclude that there is nothing journalists can do in their reporting  and ultimately the author is probably right. But I think the internet could help with ample space for pointing out multiple perspectives or at the very least get around the constraints of space on the printed page or time in a broadcast.  The BBC probably does the best job of this - although it is frequently accused of bias by conservatives (perhaps it is biased, or perhaps there is something to Stephen Colbert’s quip that “truth has a well-known liberal bias”).

But what is the reader/listener/viewer to do if they want to learn to recognize “true” (or rather excessive) bias and at the same time gain enough information to make informed decisions (often a shortcut for frame entrenchment through blending). Are we simply beholden to our cognitions approach to reasoning? Ultimately, we probably are. But that doesn’t necessarily deny us the freedom of challenging the boundaries of our frames (defined as structures of expectation by Tannen, among others). What is unreasonable to expect is a clear heuristic for discovering bias which many rationalists believe lie in logic. I suspect that the the only option is in zen-like acceptance of the limits combined with a Philosopher-like pursuit of truth through questioning. In other words, life is difficult, complex and annoyingly multifaceted but it is in our very nature to engage with its difficulty and complexity.

MercuryNews.com | 07/31/2006 | Internet raises gender gap
This gender gap, which affects everything from the marketing of new technology to attracting more women for engineering careers, is elegantly illustrated in an academic study just published by a researcher from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Eszter Hargittai tested and interviewed 51 women and 49 men drawn from a wide range of age, income and education levels. Each person was placed in front of a computer and asked to complete a series of common online tasks, such as locating job listings, downloading tax forms and finding movie starting times.

Hargittai, an assistant professor of sociology and communication studies at Northwestern, then asked each person to rate their ability in using the Internet.

When all the data was assembled and analyzed, Hargittai uncovered “no statistically significant difference between men’s and women’s ability to find content on the Web,” after taking into account external factors such as income, education and years of online experience.

Yet, Hargittai wrote in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly, “Men are more likely to think of themselves as better skilled than women. In fact, not one woman thought of herself as an `expert’ user, and not one man thought of himself as a complete novice.”

The data “suggests that gender is a very strong predictor of how one rates one’s Internet-user skills; being female leads to a significantly lower self-assessment of skill.”

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I also called several experts on technology’s gender gap, and none of them were surprised by Hargittai’s results. 

It is the last sentence that is the important bit here. I, of course, was also not surprised but it is interesting that so many people either are surprised or are willing to ignore evidence like because it doesn’t conform to conceptual models of gender. (Of course, they accuse people like me, of ignoring all the genetic/demographic, etc. evidence).

There’s lot of unconscious sexism in the technology business. Hargittai, in a phone interview, pointed to the common expression for dead-simple technology: “It’s so easy your grandmother can use it.” No one every says, “It’s so easy your grandfather can use it.”

This is a great example of how conceptual models can be represented through language. However, the question (and one for a different time) is how reliable these representations are as evidence for said conceptual models.