The 'Rhetoric' of Technical Intervention

My current academic work is focussing on what I call the "Rhetoric of Technical Intervention". This is an abstract for a paper I'm currently writing.

Learners increasingly require flexible educational provision which fits the multiple contexts of their lives and personal development paths. In meeting this need educational institutions must balance their own viable operation with the viable individual learning experiences on the part of teachers and students. Technology is increasingly playing a key role in achieving this balance, and Universities are investing in training and technologies to raise staff capacity in using learning technology and encourage pedagogical innovation. Successful implementation of such interventions presents significant challenges to the educational cybernetician.

We cite recent examples of work at the Institute for Educational Cybernetics (IEC) at the University of Bolton. On the one hand, cybernetic tools (for example, Beer’s Viable System Model) allow us to identify effective organisational practices, technologies and structures, or effective pedagogies (for example, Pask’s conversational model). On the other hand, work at IEC shows that the ways in which interventions are made can have a great bearing on their emergent success. To understand differences between the ways interventions are made, we argue that deeper models which link individual learning processes to processes of effective institutional organisation are required. In modelling these processes we have to consider a. Individual practice; b. The social impact of individual action; c. The interventions we make to change people; and d. The ways in which interventions are made.

We present models which relate to these areas of inquiry drawing on the work of Beer on viability, Luhmann on communication, and Harré’s ‘Positioning Theory’. Through computer simulation, we demonstrate how these different modelled perspectives inter-relate to give what we argue is a more ‘realistic’ insight into the university where communication between diverse types of people typifies institutional life, change is slow, politics is rife, and innovation occurs in surprising ways! We argue that these deep models represent not so much a ‘blueprint’ for the organisation of education or the provision of learning, but rather a guide to effective intervention, where different ways of making the same intervention can be considered. As such, we argue, the models represent something akin to a ‘rhetoric’ of technological intervention, where Plato’s definition of rhetoric as “the art of winning the soul by discourse” is expanded to admit technological action as ‘discursive’. With such a ‘rhetoric’, strategic acts can be explored with their likely outcomes in different circumstances. We discuss the implications of this modelling and the promise it holds for educational institutions as they seek to take better control of themselves in a fast-changing world.