Erkenntnisweisen in Alltag und Wissenschaft (Ways of knowing in Science and in Everday Life)
Understandings of learning and education are clearly culturally contingent. German-language research in these areas follows different historical and thematic dynamics than its English-language counterpart. Research in German appears more heterogeneous, and more explicitly philosophically- and historically- grounded. (See, for example, this attempt to map out this heterogeneity and historicity.)
In the 1980’s there occurred in German educational research something called the “turn to the everyday” (die Alltagswende). I recently prepared and taught a course that introduces (from an admittedly North American perspective) some of the ideas associated with this turn. This course compares theories of quotidian knowledge as conceptualized in Anglo-American cognitivism (namely, the everyday as pale imitation of scientific theory, as “folk-theory”) with approaches emphasizing the irreducible complexity of everday action and knowing (e.g. Ethnomethodology). In the end, the course concludes by emphasizing that the quotidian appears to be far more thoroughly “colonized” by information and public relation technologies than it is explained by cognitive theory. Indeed, in this light, cognitivism appears to be much more of a symptom of this colonization of “common sense” understandings by technological conceptions and practices than an adequate account of these understandings.
Note: Most of the course materials are in German, but three video-clips that may be of special interest are in English:
- Noam Chomsky and Universal Grammar (7 Mb .wmv; Short segment from Manufacturing Consent)
- Artificial Intelligence and Common Sense (36 Mb .wmv; Short segment from “The Thinking Machine” episode of The Machine that Changed the World)
- The Manipulation of the Everyday : Public Relations (7Mb .wmv; Short segment from the “Happiness Machines” episode of The Century of the Self)
The ‘colonization’ metaphor is interesting.
You may want to see Stephen Stich, “From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science,” which I enjoyed.
Comment by Stephen Downes — July 8, 2006 @ 1:31 pm