Teaching with Moodle

DC, here you go.

Now, the overarching message in the following is about the importance of dialogic teaching approaches for education including online L&T, which moodle affords due to its design based on certain ed philosophy & pedagogy.

So,

(sorry-very long post)

I have set out to unpick key concepts apparent in the Wegerif Paper... I left the synopsis-maybe you can access the doc in a more meaningful way with this-hope helpful. (Really helpful for me to think about all this again-good prep work for a project I have-so thank you).

Dialogue= conversation and inquiry (in its simplest terms Robin Alexander, 2000)

Dialogic=difference/challenge...operating in the place of tension and difference between perspectives without necessary resolution-allowing for greater complexity of difference, voice and presence

Dialectic=overcoming/unity/synthesis...A synthesis of a shared text out of different perspectives, which threatens the death of meaning, can close up finite depth of contextual meaning that is beneath dialogues. The key thing about this concept is the overcoming of one perspective, which ultimately overlays and replaces or denies or wins out over the other for Education-in terms of Vygotsky's interpretations of dialectic- being grounded on identity -according to Wegerif. But there are many philosophical takes on this:

Hegel, dialectics=a process associated with arriving at the truth by stating a thesis, developing a contradictory antithesis and combining and resolving them into a coherent synthesis

Marxist process of change through conflict of dialectical materialism =interpretation of reality that views matter as the only subject of change and all change as the product of a constant conflict between opposites arising from the internal contradictions inherent in all events, ideas and movements...dialectic is the medium that helps us comprehend a world that is permeated by paradox

Plato's dialectic is highly valued medium for truth, akin to dialogue and closely associated with the Socratic method

Aristotle believed that dialectic was inferior form of reasoning based on prior knowledge rather than empirical observation

Cicero associated dialectic with rhetoric

Modern times=

Dialectic has been vital within the German philosophical tradition beginning with Kant-whose definition closely related to Aristotle...no need for rules for executing convincing judgements but teaches how to detect and uncover judgements which bear a semblance of truth, but are in fact illusory

Bhaktin (1981): dialogic

Social, historical, cultural interchanges between voices, as opposed to monologue, leads Bakhtin to suggest stratifying forces underpin dialogic exchanges within dialogues and can therefore aid evolution/development...so meaning, semantics, linguistic changes, language markers and so on-part of a stratified system that represent particular points of view of the world (sometimes one word might create different layers of understanding in terms of the aforementioned)-so no fixed way of having to accept meaning....I suppose one way of summing up what I think about Bakhtin's dialogic is that new meanings can be created when people enter dialogue with each other or with their dialogic self, and I refer to Dawkins and Deleuze and Guatarri to spell out an analogy in order to contrast with the dialectical sense of overcoming as mentioned above.

Dawkins' (1976) suggests meme complexes to be important determinants of the evolution of cultures, 

'Memes grow and spread in natural selection, similar to our genes.Selection favours memes which exploit their cultural environment to their advantage.This cultural environment consists of other memes which are also being selected.The meme pool therefore gains attributes of an evolutionary stable set, which new memes find it hard to invade...'(Dawkins, 2000, p143).

Nevertheless, it does seem that the whole idea of drawing an analogy between physical and ideas/cultural/meme evolution is problematic, not because there is not an analogy there, but because it is hard to remain objective when examining it through our own ideological and cultural perspective.

Alternatively, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest society/cultures/ideas tend to reach a stable set in much the same way that sediments form layers in geology. And just as Dawkins talks about natural selection in determining a static relationship between memes and the environment, Deleuze and Guattari suggest everything has its order and its place, and follows a slow, structured sense of time where evolution of the landscape happens in a slow and ordered way.However, they also identify a 'line of flight' a geological example they offer is that of a volcano breaking through the strata to create a new landscape in a sudden, dramatic and unpredictable way.

Thus, lines of flight then become re-stratified. Similarly, whilst it may be suggested that a stability in living systems/cultures/language exist akin to the same static relationship between memes and the environment, according to Dawkins 'those attributes of an evolutionary stable set which new memes find it hard to invade', it can also be suggested living systems have an inherent instability which allows for something completely new to be created.              

Oh will you yell loudly if you don't get it please

: D

(Edited by Mary Cooch - original submission Wednesday, 6 August 2014, 9:25 PM)