Personal Blogs

I'm responding to my (imagined) community Care and Support Training and Education Company - QUiPS.

RECOMMENDATIONS TO BOARD.

Funding from Coketown University matching a one-off lottery grant obtained by Coketown Disability Alliance and Mental Health Survivors (Coketown) is for the academic year 2016 – 17 and must be fully allocated by March 2017 for initial start-up pilot during 2017-8, with final review of the efficacy of funding in December 2018.

 Molloy, E., Borrel-Carrio, F. & Epstein, R. 'The impact of emotions in feedback' in  Boud, D. & Molloy, E. (Eds.) Feedback in Higher and Professional Education: Understanding It and Doing It Well London, Routledge.

Yueh, H-P., Huang, J-Y. & Chang, C. (2015) ‘Exploring Factors Affecting Students’ continued Wiki use for individual and collaborative learning: an extended UTAUT perspective’ in Australasian journal of Educational Technology 31 (1) pp. 16 – 31.

Choose two of the following resources on open education to read or view:

• Gourlay (2015), Open education as a ‘heterotopia of desire’.

• Weller (2014), ‘What sort of open?’, Chapter 2 of The Battle for Open

  Hi

  I have gone for these two. The Weller is clear, well written and has all the historical perspectives you need, especially with regard to the OU. Reading page 35 reminded me of how wonderful and how radical seemed aspects of the dreams of Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle at the time. If only these ideas were as current:

  Access

  Equality

  Transparency

  No exclusions

   

  All the rest is less enthralling. Courmier (2013) reminds us that even if these dreams originated with the OU, Margaret Thatcher maintained it because of the potential for ‘lower unit-costs’ in education.

   For me this is the problem with the word. A word that carries the ‘sound’ of the virtuous and positive but one that we more often come upon as an illusory or ideological cover for things that are less benign:

  Open and free sound like something everyone wants --- but when they are societies (Popper), markets and enterprise, they can be masks for practices entirely describable as secrecy, exclusion and elitism.

  This is explored in 2 books I reviewed on H800: Tkacz (2015) who talks about the ‘open’ from its use by Popper (‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’ i.e. communism) and the philosopher ‘film-maker, Astra Taylor. (The last is a wonderful read. Review is available here. )

  Gourlay (2015) makes light work of all these idealist anti-authoritarian lightweights (described as ‘ideological’ and ‘partisan’) with a ‘nuanced’ view of the evidence (actually all based on her own department in UCL – my own alma mater).

  Her essay is obviously the more thoughtful and ‘nuanced’ resource but it really isn’t saying much more than: ‘it ain’t that simple!’ What students and teachers engage in we are told is a ‘highly situated bricolage of micro-practices’ (319) that she symbolises as an ‘oligopticon’, a version of Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon’ – a prison design in which surveillance of prisoners situated in open pens in a circular structure takes place from a tower in the middle.

  Jeremy Benthams’s body and separated head continue to exist (much decayed) in a fridge in UCL. He founded the university and donated his dead embalmed body to sit in a windowed box in the lobby of the university – his separated head in a closed box over the larger windowed box. He must be laughing now to see his creation linked to the idea of an oligopticon, precisely because he never used images like this this that could not ever be visualised.

  In an oligopticon, we cannot have total surveillance of everything that happens, ‘we see too little … but see it well’ says Latour (cited 318). The idea of universities as experts in little bits of knowledge over precisely defined and made to seem more significant on their own than they are is hardly new. Remember the question exercising some medieval philosophers: 'how many angels can dance on a pinhead?'

  The oligopticon is as far as I can see the ‘open society’ in Popper fighting the good fight against people, like Plato and Hegel (the enemies he picks on before he goes for Marx), who try to ‘see life whole’.

  If we can’t ‘see’ that our open society is not very open then that does not matter – we might as well see it as ‘open’. That is all I get from Latour and Gourlay. Meanwhile back in real life whistleblower Edward Snowden is called an enemy to ‘freedom’ and ‘openness’ in the USA and would probably be ensconced in Guantamo Bay now had he not escaped ‘freedom’.

  I don’t want to over-egg my feelings about Gourlay. This is a great and intelligent essay but its fondness for modernist metaphor (‘bricolage’ straight out of Levi-Strauss), does little to change the world or see beyond its prettily attached / detached fragments. I loved UCL but I didn’t see it as a symbol of ‘freedom’, rather it, like all other institutions, is tied into contradictions – if ‘open’, also ‘closed’ at the same time. In fact that appears to be what she is saying. Nothing is truly ‘free’ or ‘bound’ but is both at the same time. Open and closed are merely metaphors for 'a questionable binary' (p. 312). They don’t describe a world which is much more complex than that! A world of multiple perspectives that ‘clash in the night’.

  [That last bit isn’t meant, by the way, to be a description of ‘Nahid’s bed’ p. 321 (Nahid is the one of the students who is studied in the text)]

• 

The 3 advances I’d like to think about may be more or less than 3 advances because of the overlap potential. All 3 favour constructivist (although connectivism seems appropriate in Incidental Learning Examples) methodologies, but clearly much learning occurs in any learning situation that is explicable through cognitive modelling and behavioural learning.

I have started reading Knox (2016) on MOOCs and there will be a lot to say on it, I think. Not least for me, because he is making me rethink why I still want to hang on to a belief in the absolute value of  autonomous thought, almost as a bulwark against prevailing rightist hegemonic values, institutions and practices

However, after thinking a bit negatively about Siemens (2005) in a blog, I found a passing comment in Knox (2016:45) really illuminating.

Although Siemens' paper does not, he argues, move considerably beyond the 'humanist assumptions' that limit cognitivist and social cognitivist theories, he says that Siemens' (2005:4) view that knowledge 'may reside in non-human appliances' is potentially ground-breaking, although, 'this hasn't been developed subsequently' (Knox 2016:45).

In the light of those comments and thinking back To Bayne's (2015) reflections on the use of automated responses (Teacherbot or 'Botty') on the Edinburgh course) I'm having to think again. Value change in a fortnight! 

Knox, J. (2016) Posthumanism and the Massive Open Online Course: Contaminating the Subject of Global Education  New York, Routledge.

H817 Activity 11: Siemens (2005) on Connectivism (personal thoughts & musings)

It is obvious that this perspective is an important contemporary perspective on the theory of teaching and learning, I have some doubts though about:

1. The accuracy of its claims to novelty, particularly given this article’s over-generalised characterisation of  earlier theories;

2. The hyperbolic nature of some of its claims about the effects of a ‘digital age’.

I want to deal with those reservations first before I summarise my feeling that this is an unnecessary contribution to a debate about teaching and learning.

First, the claims are in large unsupported generalisations and, although there will be partial evidence for all of them, as statements they mislead. The one I like least, but it is typical of how they all work is: ‘Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking’.

In as much as the statement about ‘tools’  has substance, it has already been said by Vygotsky and is not specific to digital technology.

Second, the glib assumption – based entirely on metaphors – about the relationship between brain and computer technology is more rhetorical than substantive. Even if we forget the wiring metaphor, the organic connections that explain and facilitate brain plasticity and 'change' do so by living and dying. But change is the only certainty of this organic process. There is no final knowable end product. Synaptic connections (representing even behavioural learning) decay if unused or unusable – they leave no legacy of wires. Hence there is no case for permanent change that sustains a new brain configuration for a new ‘digital age’– not on current evidence anyway.

Although behaviourism is a very obviously limited theory, connectivism cannot (as represented by Siemens) have displaced either cognitivism or, more importantly, constructivism. The claims against cognitivism are mirrors of Paul Churchland's now embarrassing claims about connectionism, a restored version of behaviourist associationism, as the inevitable successor model of brain process. Yet cognitivism (even 'theory of mind') remains.

As for Vygotsky, Siemens can only claim the death of constructionism by misrepresenting Vygotsky (almost as if he were Piaget) and the traditions that he engendered. Although Vygotsky’s notion of the ‘zone of proximal development’ is often applied to individual learning (as  the sole theoretical support for the notion of ‘scaffolding’ as Bruner would be the first to admit), its implication is not, as Siemens hints, a theory that suggests that ‘learning occurs inside a person’.

In fact both the object of learning and the support towards learning it are entirely representable as external and social in Vygotsky, although they may admit of internal representation. Likewise internal representations succeed to external or socially shared iconic meanings. Given that understanding, Siemens adds very little that is new, unlike Engestrom, whose theories extrapolate from Vygotsky.

The dependence of connectivism on ‘serendipity, innovation and creativity’ likewise to support a continual process of recognition of new patterns (another idea from outdated connectionism) in ever growing networks is also rather romantically and rhetorically organised.

After all recognising and validating patterns would only seek to stabilise a world of change if that is all learning was about. In fact change is as dependent on pattern destruction as much as pattern recognition – hence change is about death as well as new life, vulnerability as well as confidence in renewal. If it were not, so, change (which will, of course, happen anyway in one form or another) would not be as connected as much as it is to pain as well as pleasure. In that sense, Shelley was right to see the love of change being the ability to embrace the possible (and possibly disturbing) destruction of patterns you have grown to love, if the new is to struggle into anything like emergence:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!

This paper aims begins to provide a metacognitive model of the process of becoming an autonomous learner. As a result it offers an alternative to models of reflection and, unlike the latter, is tied into a cyclical model of the learning process itself. It talks about the dialectical relationship between the virtues of guidance (experience) and freer thought. Much needed. This is a good source of ideas on the nature and function of innovation in TEL.

This model does not need false distinctions between the processes of planning, reflection and acting since the purpose of all of these phases of learning is haunted by strategies that reflect backward and forwards onto the other phases of the cycle. Schon tried to wrest the notion of reflection from the philosophers but spoke only to the notion of the professional at work. This model encapsulates and makes sense of all learning. On top of that it supports a computer model of the process - one that serves pedagogy and the sharing of pedagogic function between different stakeholders, rather than relying on the hopeless idealism of the omniscient teacher. The way forward, I think.

Here is a taster in the form of the model of Self-Regulated Learning (owing much I think to Heckhausen and Dweck as educational psychologists) from p. 24 of the article.

 Nussbaumer, A.; Dahn, I., Kroop, S., Mikroyannidis, A. & Dietrich, A (2015) 'Supporting self-regulated learning' in Kroop, S., Mikroyannidis, A., & Wolpers, M. (eds.) Responsive Open Learning Environments: Outcomes of Reasearch from the ROLE Project, Cham, Switzerland, Springer International Publishing Ltd. pp. 17 - 48. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1007/978-3-319-02399-1 (Accessed 03/02/2016)

Steve

• • Do you sense that your innovations (as supporters of learning) have been valued, encouraged, supported?  AND what evidence do you have to support your view?

• • How widespread is innovation in your organisation?  Are there policies or statements that relate to innovation? If yes, how are they implemented?
  • What implications, if any, does this have for your attitude towards innovation?

First of all, I need to say that I feel rather detached from this question. Considering myself as semi-retired , my only work role is a part-time one as an Associate Lecturer (AL) with OU. To some extent this limits any ambition to be innovative in development of educational initiatives in a macro sense.

However in terms of my micro practice (session design, student team and individual support planning and learner –teacher interaction participant) I suppose I still believe that I do have such ambitions. I wanted to deal first with these issues of micro pedagogic management, before saying a word about my perception of OU macro management of innovation.

My perception of my role as an AL is limited because:

• I have only been one for 2 years, although my experience as an OU student has been intermittently continuous since 1990;

• The role of ALs is currently under discussion with a suggested move that is much nearer to ‘staff’ status than its current slightly ad hoc contractual basis based on contracted work for an individual module – each module 'worked' having its own contact.

• The modules I teach on have both involved much vaunted innovations that have provoked varying reactions but a large degree of vocal, if passive resistance, from other ALs commenting in Tutor Forums. The prevailing mood in Year 1  on a Level 1 UG module (for me) was of experienced tutors with not only resistance to innovation but a highly vocal reminiscence on a more ideal OU past – of face-to-face interaction with one’s ‘own’ students, especially at Summer schools. I was a student during these periods and my reminiscence, though not negative at all, is far from seeing those arrangements as ideal or easily idealisable.

As a description of my experience thus far, I have found the practice of the OU, its staff and peers highly variable. My experience of involvement in micro innovation has been highly constrained by these variations in individuals and module staff team groups. The role of ALs in the OU is very much the product of a benign top-down paternalism with its explicit and implicit limitation of the AL role as the executive of design decisions from above. Many mourn these values still, it would appear.

Even innovation can be handled this way, with ’collaborative’ work with learners, guided by tutors, being pre-scripted (as a suggestion but nearly always universally adopted) and administered top-down. In one course even the use and description of forum types is prescribed – module forums for an entire cohort MUST NOT discuss teaching and learning matters for instance (they are disgnated as not 'teaching spaces'), other than in unsupervised chat. Cluster rooms must be used rather than tutor rooms in discussion and instruction with tutors.

Nevertheless this top-down presence is never entirely efficacious. My experience is of changes labelled 'innovation' leading to actual regressive stagnation, or stasis in which the innovation is adopted and colonised by older and 'tried' methodologies and pedagogies. Nevertheless this relative inefficacy leads to some autonomy for ALs who want it. Whether contractual discussions will, or are even intended to, squash this autonomy is another question and I do not know. The issue of the primacy of 'experience' in pedagogic design, which needs to be problematised in any innovation, is crucial and is largely supported by trade union activism.

In as much as I have innovated in micro terms I have been supported by line management, except where I found those innovations running counter to formal policy or working cultures.

My areas reflect my interests, skills (from my working past as a social worker and teacher) include:

• Raising expectations of students at threshold points in learning (where key skills and concepts in psychology) raise resistance in most novice learners;

• Working with people with a disability in an empowering but facilitative manner, especially in the use of advocacy;

• Follow-through on disability matters to stop regression for an individual to the lowered expectations with which they started. In a current case, I have taken on the role of unpaid advocate (within OU policy) for a continuing student I do not now teach;

• Using forums to highlight differences between cognitive presence and social presence by encouraging reflection on the methodologies of teaching and learning themselves and sharing them;

My interest in these areas has been tolerated but not overtly encouraged, except by an excellent staff tutor.

At the macro level, the OU is clearly an innovation leader, using a ‘champions’ model that is effective but in no way contradicts top-down processing and implementation of change. This is most marked in The Knowledge Media Institute (KMI). It can be accessed together with its ‘fabulous’ (my age will out ) publications and links in http://kmi.open.ac.uk

Viewing publications here has led me to believe, rightly or wrongly that the crux issue in innovation relates to either scientific and technical disciplines or ones in which a link to priorities in ‘national’ needs are apparent (in health and social care).

However, I found evidence here too (admittedly less) from 2015 publications of an interest in those things I most value: human values, creative values, and expansion of metacognition through greater openness in learner / teacher roles and relationships (more than willing to share citations on these)

My attitudes are still emergent. I was hoping that H817 would act to crystallise them a little more for myself moreover. Let’s see.

So much for my musings

Steve

Regards: McAndrew, P. & Farrow, R. (2013) ;Open Education Research: from the practical to the theoretical' in McGreal, R., Kinuthia, W & Marshall, S. (eds.) Open Educational resources: Innovation, Research and practice Vancouver, Commonwealth of Learning & Athabasca University, pp. 65-78.

Consider the following questions:

1. How would you judge OpenLearn in terms of your definition of innovation?

I consider my definition of ‘innovation’ to be still emerging out a cluster of issues that, at the moment don’t yet have, for me, clear boundaries. I suppose the nearest I get to it yet is: ‘something in the process of changing where the product is not yet fully known.’

I think that is why innovation is as likely to raise anticipatory fear as well as anticipatory pleasure. I think it is also why people, I include myself here, sometimes resist change. I suppose I believe that any ‘change’ worth the name isn’t innovation unless it provokes that resistance. That isn’t to say that the resistance is of anxiety. Sometimes it is formed from a kind of denial: ‘nothing new there ….’, ‘nothing new under the sun …, ‘yes, we’ve seen it all before…, and the belief (which often survives despite contrary evidence) that all change is cyclical. These are the myths about innovation that create stasis – or worse, stagnation. The most conservative thinkers are not against change: Lampedusa in The Leopard has his Sicilian Prince advise his heirs: “If you want things to stay the same, things will have to change.’

And I think change is also something with multiple meanings – to different people (and sometimes to the same person in a form of ambivalence). That is why I think we can’t really define ‘change’ without having multiple perspectives that might be those of the stakeholders involved in the change. That is more difficult than it seems because sometimes changes reveal, or even create, new stakeholders in the process and its products. This has been happening in the NHS for some years – to effects that are not all good. We can only regard the Open University as new and innovative if we disregard the conservative resistance and denial of the value of digital innovation of some of its institutions, professional role-bearers and people (of course not all).  

All of these stakeholders will perceive and assesses (and possibly be effected) by ‘innovation’ in different ways and this is one reason for the difficulties of bringing change about collaboratively without it being fundamentally robbed of its central intended meanings. This happened to social work reform in the 1990s.

I think McAndrew and Farrow suggest that OER is a kind of cultural object, whose meaning and potential is yet unfixed, other than in rhetorical hype (see sentence 1). Its meaning is not in what it is or does but in its ‘attractive affordances’. It is something as yet unrealised as product or process, both of which contain imponderables, a potential for re-visioning the roles, relationships and practices of an organisation, group or person. Hence for me the key stage is the sixth (‘Transformative: change ways of working and learning.’)

In education this has an effect on issues of identity, authority, power and, of course, the distribution between stakeholders of rewards. Think of the real revolutionary effect of fundamentally changing the relationship of learner and teacher, the employment of bot devices (Bayne 2015): ‘Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine SHOULD be replaced by a machine’ (for reference see the blog on Bayne 2015 below). I think this is why McAndrew and Farrow disappoints a little – positivity about ‘growth’ and ‘progress’ forgets to point out that these processes are necessarily complex with many facets: quantitative, qualitative or occurring internally or externally to the changing thing. That is why the debate in the OU can seem rather unsatisfactory. What looks like a massive amount of external change may not be even perceived within some of the institutions internal agencies. I remember once making a suggestion for reviewing the access to discussion forums between learners and Associate Lecturers. The outcry was so phenomenal from other ALS, my suggestion was shut down only weeks after it went live, with a minus score that would challenge greater ‘losers’ than I to prove themselves.

For me the great untested element in this paper is the assumption that the ‘potential of OER to act as an agent of change’ can be realised without those changes being end-stopped by resistance. The paper talks of a pilot that cannot be expected to test the longevity and uncertainties of emergent forms.

1. What key challenges facing the OER movement can be dealt with more quickly than others?

Of those listed on p. 68, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 11 are relatively easy to provide and positively adopt. But changing the control of teaching/learning and assessment/evaluation design will meet resistance from paid professionals and their unions and threaten promotion or adoption, or fundamentally disempower the innovation’s potential to project into future renewal. This is in part for reasons mentioned above.

1. How do open educational resources challenge conventional assumptions about paying for higher education modules?

This relates to the issue of distribution of costs and benefits between stakeholders in education. The tendency, even in ‘empowerment’ models of teaching has been to increasingly shift the ‘costs’ of education to its consumer (not least in this new term for learner). Thus teaching has become, in defence of its right to maintenance of financial and other rewards, increasingly polarised from learning as either a process or product, in favour of models of the necessity of control and authority. There is something to this argument but it can be answered by innovative learning design which distributes costs and benefits somewhat differently. The control role of accreditation (p. 74) in maintaining teacher and institutional authority is the hardest nut to crack I think and perhaps one where certain key stakeholders will recognise no debate worth having. When I taught in a university, one teacher was reported, by learners to me as then subject head, to have told his groups: ‘remember I mark your assignments.’

Vavoula’s useful model, which finds a place for what we use to call the ‘hidden curriculum’ – in the formally unspecified and non-prescribed. This is where the values of any ideology can subsist, but especially those who claim, like the ‘open market’, that they are not ideological. It doesn't take a Zizek to disprove this.

All the best

Steve

A PERSONAL ACCOUNT ONLY

Sian Bayne (2005 - in Education  in Cyberspace) details original research completed on protocols of experience of an OU online course done by both Associate Lecturer tutors (ALs) and students. Comparatively she found that while learning impacted on the identity of learners positively and negatively (as excitement and anxiety respectively), no such impact was found for ALs. The latter group appeared immunised against identity effects by a notion of authority attached to their role (in their own self-presentation of it) and their specific relationship to OU learners.

Bayne gives no indication, at least as I remember, of how such differences are to be evaluated. However, my own response to them suggested the need for decisive personal action that was not only professionally but ethically driven for me. When experience of teaching and learning are split by notions of authority, boundary  experience of both roles is more difficult to imagine and perhaps to handle effectively and with anything like authenticity. I certainly feel this - as AL on 2 undergraduate courses and, currently, learner on 2 courses; one of which has been taken in the  form of 'Staff Development' and therefore funded by my employer.

Authority in Western culture is perennially correlated in experience with status, although there seems to me no absolute necessity for such a link, especially when the 'authority' involved is one over a specific set of knowledge and skills. Perhaps of more concern is the link between authority, status and executive power, particularly when the limits of the latter are ill-defined. There are possible necessary correlations - especially in teaching a subject in which 'practice' is the essential route to 'expertise' in it (and perhaps that is all knowledge and skills however 'purely' an academic discipline is defined). For instance, no social work practitioner with persons at risk of abuse could empower a learner to apply knowledge and skills without their oversight implied as a safeguard. At a minimum the rights are a necessity of assessment that is not, and is considered never to be capable of, participatory sharing with learners. The possibility of such participation has been suggested by Boud (see blog below) and some others.

In the OU, ALS hold separate accounts as ALs to any they may hold as a learner. This may seem to suggest that the two identities (learner & teacher) might be held distinct, however, I rarely find that distinction as un-blurred as may be suggested.

Recently I have found boundary issues playing across the handling of a number of incidents in each role. It is appropriate here only to deal only at an abstract distance from the evidence per se.

In both current (and recent past) modules as a learner, a condition of participation is self-identification with, and discussion of, a work role. These demands are made in both summative assessment exercises and in shared formative learning activity online. The boundaries hence become blurred - not least because negotiation of the boundaries of this role have to take place in a space sufficiently public to necessitate (or so some people believe) restraint and caution.

Hence, some personal views and even some 'evidence' that underpins them are not permitted access to the discussion. Both courses I study currently deal with the handling of staff-student interactions but those interactions commonly demand boundary revisions - when, for instance my tutor experience, even if merely described, can seem to some authoritative readers as subversive. Alternatively when what I learn (from Bayne for instance) can only be with considerable constraint applied to the tutor role (even in theory rather than praxis), especially when that learning appears to require a softening of the boundaries of both the power and status that can underpin authority. I do not feel in a position here to give direct evidence (asserting only that it exists) for reasons cognate to this 'real-world' problem.

As I understand it, Bayne is still researching this area at Edinburgh. For me, that research cannot come soon enough. All power to the Edinburgh school, I say!

All the best

Steve

Hi *******,

This is just speculation. I'm happy for you to put me right.

As I see it, Naom Chomsky's politics are not an effect of his theory of language but are derivable from it. He believes in innate structures at deep level that can undergo infinite creative changes in social use (at the level of 'performance') by the individual. Politically he stands against those who try to limit that creativity - powerful groups and 'their' governments and media that take on the role of 'manufacturing consent' (there is a wonderful BFI documentary on this) in individuals and groups derived socially from the bottom-up, which otherwise might think differently.

This fits with a principle of the infinite creativity of the individual within a common structure of biologically given humanity but it leaves each individual with political choices. This is the basis of what he called 'anarcho-syndicalism'. It is explored by the great Scottish socialist novelist, James Kelman, who was heavily influenced by Chomsky's politics and linguistics (see his novel 'Translated Accounts') and his use of 'natural' language.

In contrast, Alastair Pennycook seems to want us to have a pre-decided political programme in our applied linguistic critical analysis - something he finds missing in Widdowson. In contrast, Widdowson believes that the linguist merely describes analytically the 'real-life problem'. Action follows but still involves choices made in the light of what we discover. 

Does this go on similar lines, *******, or am I wide of the beam.

All the best

Steve

I visited this lecture with a purpose in mind. I've just started E845 on 'Applied linguistics' and I'm thinking of areas for my end-of-term project. I want to marry up some interests in multimodal communication in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) AND the role of embodiment in the relationship between metaphor and viewpoint. This is very much the arena of Dancygier's current work. this lecture was a great chance to start work on it. 

When I look at my interests I realise that, although I know I want to study these topics my grasp of them remains as yet only shadowy - perhaps 'vague' is the less flattering term. I need to read her book on 'Figurative Language' and 'The Language of Stories' first. Here then is  a very little of what I got from this stimulating lecture as a 'sample' and as a memo for me as E845 progresses.

The best way I can think of doing this is to take one of the instances of how conceptual viewpoint becomes the basis of 'meaning-making'. She looks at how embodied imagery in a passage of Virginia Woolf maps the body and the position from which we are seeing in a description of daffodils in To The Lighthouse:

'the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless and therefore terrible.'

Initially mapping the 'flower' against the body as seen externally, standing', meaning is complicated by a shift of viewpoint to the subject position of the flower itself - but a subject description that is 'eyeless' (I-less?). I feel an intertextual moment here - the world of Milton's Samson Agonistes, 'Eyeless in Gaza' -  but more important, as Dancygier says (if I have yet begun to understand her), is that it is the gestural contortion of body position from which meaning originates that really fills this language with meaning - even when that meaning is seeing 'nothing', time and prospect as nothing. The Woolfian domain of play indeed.

We start Dancygier argues with simple image schemas in language, which we might use every day and which form relatively simple conceptual structures. Thus a wall, as word or image is a 'block' to a conceptual viewpoint, but it can be manipulated as our viewpoint of it changes until it is rich with meaning - a point she illustrates from famous speeches on the BERLIN wall and its fate. A 'bottom-up' process starts with simple schemas, manipulates them using various techniques - the most important of which is re-construal, In this one complex image domain is interpreted through another, thus one journalist reconstrues the American middle-class in the image of Bouazizi, the man whose self-immolated body started the Tunisian revolt against corrupt government, because the journalist locates each domain in in a conceptually simpler schema of embodied despair. 

I need to think on this more. Professor Dancygier offered us 'infinite riches in a little room' (to quote Volpone and, in part, the event chair). I was glad to be there. I may, I hope, follow this up.