Part III Applying the Co-Participation Model

This section returns to the observations and anecdotes of the first two chapters of the book and, as promised, explains them in the light of what has come in between. Although it has taken most of the book to explain it, the basics of the theory probably can be expressed in a couple of paragraphs, which I now attempt to do.

Technology is concerned with the organization of stuff to do stuff, then organized with other stuff to do even more stuff. Pedagogies are part of both that stuff and its organization. We are co-participants in a deeply intertwingled technological system of learning, through which we learn from and with one another. We all teach, and most of what we create teaches too, participating in our cognition as not just an object of learning but also an inherent aspect of it. We are part technology, and technology is part us. How we do things—the techniques that we use—fill the gaps that other technologies leave, and they fill the gaps between us, connecting us with one another as much as they connect the stuff that they assemble. Each use we make is itself an organization of stuff to do stuff: a technology. Sometimes we are just part of the organization, doing what has to be done for the technology to work, but the more of the stuff that we organize for ourselves the softer the technique and the less predictable its unfolding.

Most technologies, as we enact them, are at least a little soft, and all can become so in the right assembly. Soft technologies are idiosyncratic, never repeating, always moving into the adjacent possible, often revealing who we are, and affecting both us and those around us in unpredictable, unprestatable ways. The hard techniques and the stuff that they assemble are critical to this unfolding, without which we could not progress at all, but they are not predictive of it. The relationship is one of enablement, not entailment and, though harder structural elements do strongly affect how the gaps between them can be filled, there are always different ways that we can arrange them, always new stuff with which they can be assembled to do something not hitherto imagined, always new ways that they can interact with the complex whole of which they are a part.

I might have missed a few crucial steps, but that’s the gist of it and I believe it explains many phenomena and addresses a wide variety of problems and confusions in educational research and practice. This section provides examples of how it may be applied.

Chapter 9 discusses the anecdotes from Chapter 1, showing how the vastly distributed nature of teaching and learning can explain many real-life phenomena that otherwise might be puzzling or go unnoticed.

Chapter 10 delves into the reasons behind the observations made in Chapter 2, explaining various problems or phenomena that have challenged generations of educational researchers and practitioners, such as the no-significant-difference phenomenon, Bloom’s 2 sigma challenge, the lack of value of learning styles in teaching, and the inherent motivational shortcomings of in-person formal education.