“Please, don’t be educational!”: Waste, Civilisation, Learning

After a tip-off from Charles Stross’ always-excellent blog, I’ve been very struck by Karl Schroeder’s reflections on a paper concerning the Fermi Paradox by Keith B. Wiley at Washington U. The paper offers a range of considerations concerning our lack of contact with alien civilisations, and (almost in passing) considers the range of expected signals that we would have expected to find from such civilisations.

Schroeder’s take on this is that all of these signals – be they electromagnetic “noise”, self-replicating deep space probes, the construction of orbital computing resources – are by-product (or waste) expressions of essentially wasteful civilisations. And that truly advanced civilisations would not produce waste. I like his re-statement of Clarke’s Third Law, that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature”. In other words, we wouldn’t see it because we wouldn’t have any way of knowing it wasn’t natural.

Our own Western Civilisation bases itself on a presumption of resource scarcity, and I would perhaps paradoxically argue that waste is a by-product of scarcity: both in terms of “process waste” (the stuff we create incidentally whilst trying to get to scarce stuff) and “use waste” (the scarce stuff that we don’t actually bother using after we get it for various psychologically and sociologically interesting reasons).  The philosophy of the Zero Waste Institute (ZWI) is well worth a further look in this context, as the website states with impressive clarity:

“How has humanity dealt with the excess goods it generated?

First generation (immediate satisfaction)…  DISCARD and DUMPS = GARBAGE
Second generation (short term)… POST-DISCARD REUSE = RECYCLING
Third generation (long term)… EXPLICIT DESIGN FOR REUSE = ZERO WASTE”

Schroeder seems to be putting genuinely advanced alien civilisations at a postulated “Fourth Generation” within this system, which I could perhaps state as:

“Fourth generation (eternal) … GOODS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM NATURE = NEGATION OF WASTE AS CONCEPT”

We open all kinds of bio-engineering cans of strawberry-flavoured worms here – but you could argue that microbes designed to produce drugs or food designed to be resistant to rot are the beginnings of a movement that could end with all technology becoming indistinguishable from nature, and thus within a natural cycle that has “waste” as one of several interim stages. (I’m assuming here, of course, that humankind manages to sort out this nonsense about patenting such things…)

Anyway, I’m fully aware I’m on dodgy ethical ground here, so let’s talk about David Wiley’s idea of “Open Educational Resources (OER) as classroom exhaust” – learning materials being shared as the by-product of learning.  In ZWI terms we appear to be in the second generation here, perhaps beginning as OER becomes a more mainstream idea (and, we hope, practice) to edge in to the third. 

Wiley is clear that he’s taking the concept from the idea of the “data exhaust“, which I would argue is actually a different beast entirely. A “data exhaust” is process waste – we’ve not deliberately set out to create user data, it just happened whilst we were trying to get to those resources we wanted to use. In contrast, learning materials are use waste, it’s stuff that we deliberately put together to use for learning that didn’t get used up.

A fair chunk of these learning materials may actually be in ZWI generation one (and therefore not in Wiley’s virtuous classroom exhaust), so we dump it because we feel it is neither recyclable nor reusable outside of the the immediate context that we have just been using it in. So what do we do to learning materials to make them so context specific?

An article I’ve had on my “to think about” stack for a long while is by writer and concert pianist Stephen Hough. In “Please, Don’t Be Musical“, he laments the way that musicians in training internalise so many conventions around the expression of musicality that we hear musicality rather than music. He quotes and reflects on the words of an old piano teacher:

“I remember very clearly a certain lesson with Gordon Green when I was about twelve years old. I was playing the opening of the first movement of Beethoven’s sonata op. 110 and, just as I reached the decorative arpeggios at the bottom of the first page, he stopped me: “My dear boy, this music is not beautiful [pause for a deep draw on his smouldering pipe] … it is sublime“. I was responding to the superficial charm of the melody instead of reaching inside the flesh and bones to the very soul of the music. It is a lesson hard to learn because it seems as if at the very moment when we have built up an impressive arsenal of interpretative trinkets we need to start getting rid of them. It is allied to life itself: as soon as we’ve learned how to behave as an adult we need to start to rediscover our childhood again.”

I wonder if educators preparing materials for learning are themselves guilty of “educationality” – you could see the “interpretative trinkets” as being conceptions of educational intent in a particular context, based around various theories of learning or environmental variables, manifesting themselves as tangible  on an otherwise reusable resource. And it could be this “educationality” that gets in the way of reuse? Is “educationality” an indicator of waste? Is “educationality” what we have in the limo?

I’ve been around ds106 long enough to know the difference between mere beauty and the sublime (is there a plaisir/jouissance thing here?) and the latter tends not to have an implicit learning intention. Indeed, it could also be argued that “learning materials” from ds106 are generally shared because they are (a) learner-created and (b) awesome. And because, if you didn’t know the source, you wouldn’t think they were learning objects.

On the web, they are indistinguishable from nature.