Papers and Conferences and Future Plans
This year, for the second time, I will hopefully have the chance to join an international congress on learning and to present even two papers this time. I am really looking forward to it, as last year in Chile had been so motivating and generative for further work. It is what this Weblog is about: Learning on Gregory Batesons Level III (I really, really recommend to anybody who is concerned with learning to read his book(s) and watch the beautiful film of his daughter Nora Bateson about his life and work: Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind;: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. San Francisco: Chandler Pub. Co.; Bateson, N. (2010). An Ecology of Mind: A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson. Remember the Future [DVD]: Carl-Auer Verlag, DGSF, mindjazz, Alive.). The last one can be found here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/bateson.
But what I wanted to say: Joining and participating in a conference like the LTEC is living Learning III! You meet people from all over the world, and discuss learning-processes. You get to know other contexts, other points of view and you have metacommunication about what it really means to communicate. Objective of the chairs of this conference is, to bring people together, and to make them talk and do research on learning and knowledge together. I met scientists from NewZealand, China, Japan, Finnland, England, France, Slovenia and many other countries.
For my further plans it will be very important to know people working at universities all over the world, as in my dissertation I want to do further research on Learning-Levels and Stages in the context of Digitalization and Social Media, as I did in my B.A. and recently do in my M.A. on Globally Networked Learning Processes in Higher Education which will be finished very shortly. I regard seeing this processes from an interdisciplinary and intercultural point of view as the only way to do research on learning for a future, where – at least or as a first step in the area of higher Education – boundaries will (go on to) melt, between learners and “teachers”, between generations and between different cultures and systems.
For the LTEC in Maribor I submitted two very different papers. One is about my recent work and part of my M.A. Thesis, it is a theoretical approach and discusses the above aspects. The second one is more empirically and describes the conceptualization and first evaluations of a Writing Lab at the Distance University in Hagen, which I did as first project when I started to work at the Distance University. It is an example and first small step to academic learning by socializing, by learning cooperatively in courses that do not deal with study-content in a direct way, but on a meta-level that enables to deeper reflection of content and brings together students from different “stages” and areas of their academic studies. Therefor both papers are as well very different as also very connected, as they start research on similar objectives from totally different angles and starting points.
Within the next days I will share here my abstracts of the papers and I would be happy, if you join in the discussion and give ideas and concepts and reflection on how to work and research on both: Starting to include highly heterogeneous learning groups in already existing degree-programs, but also to think and write and reflect on the vision of a global online-university that brings together students from all over the world to study together by regarding their heterogeneity as potential and chance to enhance: To learning-processes coming up to Batesons Level III of learning and enabling to rethink learning, to re-frame patterns and to commonly find new “Context Markers” (Bateson, 1972).