Personal Blogs

The Ownership of Learning: issues related to conceptualising 'learning' as a product

This contribution owes something to a distinction drawn in Ian Derbyshire's contribution to the Ownership thread in Bob Kemp's Tutor Group Forum Week 19. As I write this, I begin to recall that my language here, that of 'debt', is itself not unrelated to the idea of who 'owns' an idea. However, rather than pursue this now, I wanted to 'take' (suddenly a thief) Ian's distinction between learning considered as either:

1. A process, or;

2. A product.

I fully agree with Ian's distinction and use this agreement (and my attribution of his 'right' to the original ownership of the idea enables me, I take it, to understand that I have been contracted to use that idea).

However, I want here to concentrate solely on three ways in which the idea of 'ownership' has been relevant to my experience (as a learner and teacher) of 'learning' considered only in in its character as 'product'.

1. Ownership as a Right

   1. 'Ownership' is the name that can be given to the belief that I have certain rights in relation to something I possess. For instance, a slave-owner believes they have the right not only to use the mental and bodily talents of a slave but also to alienate by sale or dispose of in other ways, by overuse or wanton destruction, that possession. The choice of example here is deliberately stark, but it would be equally true if the possession were a 'pen', whose capacities I turn to my advantage till I tire of it or wear out its non-sustainable resources.

   2. I can lend my possession to others or permit the reproduction of its content without giving up these rights. I may contractually require acknowledgement from the person to whom I lend my ideas that they are 'mine', either by financial return or statement of attribution of the fact of my ownership. Therein lies the basis of the right we call 'legal copyright', and therein lies the basis of 'referencing' systems in academic work. We use the ideas at the cost of formal attribution.

   3. I have illustrated this by acknowledging a debt to Ian above. The process is however, unless we believe that an idea is 'original' in its entirety, endless with each borrowing from a writer entailing a series of other borrowings. Do I have to also acknowledge the sources of Ian's idea for instance, and so on - potentially ad infinitum?

       

2. Ownership as a label

   1. If I own something I label it as 'mine' (rather than 'yours' or 'hers' or theirs). In terms of ideas I usually use the words 'I' and 'my' to express the fact that they belong to me.

   2. Academic language, despite the demand for attribution by referencing of 'taken' ideas to others, restricts the use of 'I' and 'my' in relation to concepts or observations, demanding third-person recounting. Fay (1996:216ff.) attributes this convention to the demand academic writing has historically made of itself to represent the world 'objectively'. This paradigm is questioned now. Fay (ibid) argues that it hides the fact that all 'inquiry is inevitably perspectival, and its results inherently partial and interested.' Knowledge presented in the third-person is precisely knowledge without a label of ownership (and herein lies some more of the academic's anxiety about adequate referencing). It is, Fay suggests, knowledge offered without the accountability of its originator being openly acknowledged. Of course, many academic methods nowadays (although it wasn't the case when I was young) recommend 'reflection' and 'reflexivity' as means of re-instating the accountability of authorship. However, such practices rarely descend below higher under-graduate work and cause anxiety even then in students accustomed to hearing the prohibition against 'I' in essays as if it were an inner voice.

   3. So what is that to do with technology? The strange relationship between academia and Wikipedia is worth considering in this respect. Wikipedia has become the home and defender, almost as a defence against academic criticism of it, of the 'neutral point of view'. Is such a view an abjuration of 'ownership' of knowledge by individuals or an irresponsible lack of accountability in the statement of 'original' ideas? Wikipedia eradicated the problem by banning 'original' material.

       

3. Ownership as statement of taking responsibility for a larger tradition or a 'fashion'.

   1. When I first went into social work, I remember a manager saying to me that I had to take 'ownership' of words as they are understood in the profession - words such as 'assessment' for instance that it is not used in the way educators used it then. What this suggests to me on reflection is that 'professionals' take on that role and persona by 'owning' its specialist language. It was in that spirit that in 2005, I trained in primary care mental health at Teesside University.

   2. In my first assessed essay, we were invited to contextualise anxiety and depression (the areas of specialist training we underwent) in relation to practices in primary care. For me that meant, I thought, 'owning' a relationship to the language of medical practice. In one point I referred to the 'nosology' of those mental health conditions, a word I confronted in a book by a GP. The word comes from the same Greek root as the second part of the word, 'diagnosis'. It refers to the study of diagnostic categories. When my essay was returned, the feedback referred to my use of 'made-up' words, like 'nosology', which the marker, a former mental health nurse, had never heard. I was mortified - although I never get 'mortified' so easily now.

   3. Challenged later, the marker said the word was anyway too specialist and too 'technical'. Exception was taken to the use of words originating in classical languages. I take this point, since as a mental health worker I would not use the word to a person using the service. However, how would I 'read' books from the medical tradition without 'owning' it, at least in part?

   4. The problem does not go away. When I was taught grammar in the 1960s, teachers stressed the heinous nature of using an 's' to pluralize words from Latin like 'forum'. The true plural must be (they forced me to 'own'), as in Latin, 'fora'. Now, such uses are themselves frowned on and seen as incorrect and the tendency is to 'disown' them. This one is a big worry for me on H800 'forums'J. However Latinate plurals continue to exist in English (flora, fauna, agenda, and data) but only when the singular of those words (agendum and datum in particular) is rarely used - or seen, more often, as a lexical error. The lesson: do not try to 'own' a classically derived vocabulary and grammar - indeed 'disown' it and 'own' modernity. In the end knowledge becomes this way reduced to a form of higher 'fashion' where what you own gives you away - anyone got any bell-bottom jeans out there?

Those are my reflections.

All the best

Steve

_________________________________________________________________

Fay, B. (1996) Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science Oxford, Blackwell Publishing.