designing serendipity?

I am coming back to ask about literature use and literature use in my own experience, and writing a journal article, and getting stuck when I try to draft from the top – stuck when I get diverted by the literature …

Interesting article on the art of persuading by John Dickson.  This has connections for me, concerning my incapacity to persuade, which was particularly apparent during 1968-1972.

It also has links to recent contributions to ‘popular misconceptions’ .. an aspect of Mezirow’s ‘Distorted Assumptions and Toulmin’s Fallacies .. and my collection and analytical tool of Faulty thinking.

Other recent contributors to my growing file are Ross Gittins’ commentary on David Myers and Dave Snowden

Fascinating take on this issue from David Brooks of the New York Times

Interesting comment about writing styles for different processes: the essay for the conscious; the narrative for the unconscious …

When I was a senior school student of English Literature (circa 1961/2), one insight stood out for me – irony, in Shelley’s Ozymandias.

As far as I can remember, that was the first time my perception of learning, in Eng Lit, went beyond ‘learning the facts’.

Yes, I had learnt that ‘metaphor’ is a form of speech, and is when one thing is claimed to be another, as in ‘The moon was a ghostly galleon …’; compared with simile which used ‘as’ or ‘like’ to preface the claim.

I have met up again with ‘metaphor’, and now much later.  Jack Mezirow speaks of metaphor being an indicator of the kind of reflective work/thinking that conveys the potential to move a person’s meaning perspective (what he calls ‘transformative’), or provides evidence of such a shift (p.219).

I have been used to the idea of ‘analogy’ and that kind of thinking being helpful for creative theorising since reading of Kekule’s snake, and the benzene ring (probably Asimov, probably about 1960).

Now I am understanding metaphor, and that kind of thinking, to be related to abduction, as distinct from deduction and induction.

The process of comparison, so vital to ‘research’ and working with ‘findings’, to manage lots of data, is part of this older understanding of how an educated person can use language, and so and more ‘creatively’.

In my thesis (1999-2005) I worked some more with Gregory Bateson’s idea of the meta- … meta-cognition, meta-communication, the second-level process of thinking about thinking, communicating about communication etc.

So what is the meta-4? (as per punning) … to help us think and to communicate our thinking …

How important is it? It seems to me that irony, paradox, truth hidden in the meaning of words, is something that will be with me all my life.  Whether  I can make something more of this understanding is another matter; let alone considering how I make something more of this …

Before I grow much older, I want to try and capture where my thinking is at.

I am engaging with Werner Ulrich’s JRP article from 2006, again, and from the present turn in my hermeneutical spiral.

And Stephen Downes’ inputs about PLEs is paying off here too.

As I read Werner’s comments about the ‘discursive turn’, I am noting

it tends to divert the attention of researchers away from the need to develop new skills of critical argumentation beyond those of quantitative analysis and, at the same time, to revise their notion of professional competence accordingly[dla1] .

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[dla1]Connects with my experience of ‘analysis’ eg from Dunn’s policy analysis experience – analysis is not the only way to address the complex; creative synthesis, eg via metaphor, is another (and if my understanding, of all language being metaphoric, holds water, then language is /has always been our next most primary tool for /of inquiry, ie before counting, which involves ‘naming’ quantities!); so I am agreeing with Ulrich on the discursive critique approach, amongst consenting and informed and competent peers, but also going another step to a meta- metaphor – the metaphor of metaphor.

I have also made abductive connections with the reference to Don Quixote and tilting at windmills.

Another point of connection is with

Popper’s empiricist framework of science theory [dla1] apparently did not allow him to consider–and take seriously–sources of critique other than those of experimental science.

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[dla1]This is where I understand myself to be still at, as a first default …

I need to remember: no grand theories; and Model II and Model I can be held by the one person, and perhaps held in tension like most living paradoxes.

Is the next grand theory that of paradox?

And earlier still, I noted, and here is the Downes process coming into play,:

Popper agreed with Neurath that there is no such thing as a direct access to empirical phenomena that would not be mediated through theoretical expectations and interpretations[DLA1] .

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[DLA1]Any word in language is a theoretical expectation and interpretation .. the map is not the territory.

Hence critique of ‘naming’.

Where did I read about that recently?  About a teacher of observation and students and fish .. and making them keep on observing … Not in the apologetics item.

Perhaps one of the Google Reader ones … no apparently

Perhaps one of Giorgio’s links … drawn a blank there too???

In bed I thought that perhaps checking my internet behaviour might point to a recent web page where this might be.  Today 21/2 I cannot check that because the desktop is ‘down’.  The during the night dreaming was involving staff at UoW FoE, both Sue’s, and confusion about my role there.  Now with the desktop down, and other responsibilities of documentation having first priority, the working on that dreaming idea has escaped me.

Found it this morning 21/2 by being patient with Anecdote from Reader. The reference is http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2010/02/keeping_richnes.html.

As I draft, and mobilise my knowledge to build an argument, I need to refresh my memory of the written work of others, to effectively cite.  I have an impression that so-and-so said such-and-such, but don’t quite know exactly where  (ie committing verbatim text and chapter-and-verse to memory is not something well developed in my childhood, excepting by the accompaniment of music).  But I do have this memory-remnant, and in regularly revisited reading (eg of the three synoptic gospels, or of Paul’s letters to the churches) I have a greater remembrance of basic context, so I can  scan relatively quickly for it, and with concordances or electronic search engines these days I can use ‘key words’ to search efficiently and find.

But not all of the documents I have accessed are in a digital form, yet, and my processing of my reading includes integrating the material into my frame, with its selective attentivenesses, and involves some synthesising re-expression, so that when I go ‘back to the literature’ I cannot always find a sentence, or form of words, that captures the remnant memory impression of how I want to speak of the idea I want to reference.

Going back to the literature, however, and searching again, by reading afresh the detail that has been forgotten, can have its own rewards: sometimes, as today, while re-reading Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, I see things in detail that I don’t remember having seen before.  The hermeneutical spiral and iterative process, that is ongoing for me, has prepared me so that I can read and understand the same words read before, in a different way now.

The process of developing a habit of capturing reflective thinking as I work with my practice issue has now built a large repository of similar data.  The task of drafting, and redrafting to be more concise, has given me some polished resources that can be revisited and sometimes it is there that the precise reference, including a page number, is found.

The process of slowing down my reading, of theoretical and technical writing, by transcribing the material that first caught my attention, which I have used since undergraduate days (1963-6) to assist my memory and understanding has been enhanced recently.  Since 1996, I have captured the transcribed material digitally, and since 1998 I have been consciously capturing my contemporaneous reflective thinking about that first read and transcribe, so that now I have another resource of digitised data to search via simple ‘find’ commands (or someday soon, when I have tidied up my archived files of redundant duplication, I might invoke Google to search my desktop).

So, today, while mining the archives, I have found:

To what extent I need to explore disciplines like semantics, linguistics, psychology, xxx, to be able to deal with the issues that arise in my practice, is open, and may depend on whether I can find a group of cooperative inquirers where these disciplinary resources are available, and I can engage with cooperative inquiry with them (May 2004 draft of thesis conclusion)

Ha! I knew it! add to “semantics and linguistics”,  ‘syntax’, and maybe even ‘TESOL’,  and you have some of  the issues that my current practice is throwing up … prepositions, vocabulary and categories and possible ontologies, developing abstractions, literacy, the context of writing,  etc

He (the non-native English speaker) wrote

Teachers and administrators are in the heart of this transition since they are directly responsible for implementing ICT in educational curricula.

I jumped to correct the ‘in the heart’ to ‘at the heart’.

And then I stopped, and thought, and commented to myself:

Interesting aspect of prepositional use .. why am I (21^st century Australian) reluctant to say ‘in the heart’, as a metaphor for the critical/key role they play in this change?

Such a little thing, these prepositions.  Such a minor change?  But if we are talking, and thinking, about sociocultural aspects of change, perhaps there is more to it than that.

One of the tools of creative problem solving, useful in group work, including in dispute resolution, involves brainstorming – gathering, unevaluated, ideas associated with the presenting problem, from a group of people.  One of the processes of such braintorming is the stimulation of associated words and ideas gathered into such words.  Brainstorming is a bit like de Bono’s green hat work, with a dash of yellow hat work.

One of Lewin‘s key suggestions for analysis of non-trivial amounts of ethnographic description required for the kind of qualitative research that is involved in observing and understanding social situations, is something akin to  ’chunking‘: bringing together, under a single term, a constellation of factors, eg ‘gatekeeper’ for the kinds of activities a member of a community/group undertakes to manage the flow of information into and out from the community/group. It involves the development of a metaphor.(‘Topological’ mapping is another of Lewin’s suggestions.) (See Argyris, 1993 Knowledge for Action, p.8-10)

As I was considering the task of deciding categories, for a non-native English speaker, as part of the process of handling a lot of data, I noted

To what extent might recognising commonalities of categories be related to language comprehension?  To what extent is what I am doing related to my propensity for convergence by abstraction – going, I think, to a ‘broader’ level of inclusivity?   Others’ clouds and clusters work with words.

Now I find that ‘clustering’ is a technical term, with the propensity for use with computers, reminding me that when I was using NUD.IST for my data analysis, I was amused to find this qualitative analysis tool reporting results in a numeric form, as if recurrence was most significant.

In reading someone else’s writing for understanding, for meaning-making there are two sets of understandings and associations of words in play: the reader’s set, and the writer’s set.  No wonder miscommunication happens.

In thesis work, when clarity of communication is so vital, no wonder time and precious words are spent on working with some key definitions.

One of my ponderings, as I have worked with non-native English speaking thesis drafters, relates to the extent that vocabulary limits/determines the categories available for the more general abstractions.

In Whetten & Cameron’s Developing Management Skills, (p.64, 4th ed) the aspect of ‘cognitive complexity’, together with greater capacity for tolerating ambiguity, is raised.  ‘Individuals with a high tolerance of ambiguity also tend to be more cognitively complex’.  The point is made that individuals with greater cognitive complexity tend to have more ‘sense making categories’ than those with a low cognitive complexity.  Then they go on to say:

for the most part, in an information-rich environment, tolerance of ambiguity and cognitive complexity are more adaptive than the opposite characteristics.

Donald Schon, in The Reflective Turn, (1991), p.349, talks of ‘fundamental categories’ in terms of ‘ontology’, and the nature of the underlying story that can be developed to inform a researcher, and particularly while they are observing. and indicates that the availability of a range of categories will be one aspect of developing rigor, in Popper’s terms. (The other strand of the development of rigor will lie in the research approach, and the extent to which it is open to others being involved in esting validity). Schon says:

… appropriate rigor in the study of practice will depend on the researcher’s ability to generate, compare and discriminate among multiple representations of practice phenomena – that is, to formulate alternate causal stories of the phenomenon in question and test their competitive resistance to refutation .. the ontology, or fundamental categories, of an underlying story determines the kinds of observations that must be made in order to disconfirm an explanation derived from that story.

One of the problems for a non-native English speaker, in working with qualitative findings, may then arise from their lack of vocabulary in English, or to what extent, when learning English vocabulary to translate their thinking in their native language, they permit some of the nuances of their native language to be lost in choosing a reasonably well-recognised English word.

As a native speaker, one of the significant tools to aid my drafting is a thesaurus – the collection of like but different terms, with their respective nuances.

Big picture thinking, with its convergent tendency, and creative conceptualising, tend, as I understand it to be one of the hallmarks of academic literacy.

Being an old chemist, I have been drawn to a taxonomy of learning that has been presented as a ‘periodic table’.

I need to spend some time there, asking myself if anything like the atomic theory of explanation applies here as well, and if so what would I understand the protons and electrons to be?