Using a 'rip, mix, burn' metaphor for learning

This is an expansion of an earlier blog and a position paper.

This paper is divided into three parts:

• An explanation of the rip, mix, burn metaphor
• Using the metaphor as a model for learning, considering the perspectives of Sanger, Thornburg, and Gladwell
• Further questions to explore the metaphor

The rip, mix, burn model

Manovich (2005) points out that traditionally, education flows from a source to a receiver; in education the teacher transmits knowledge to the student in the hush of the classroom.  However, he believes that in education 2.0, knowledge is collaboratively constructed through multiple dialogues, as at a party. He sees this as the 'remixing' of knowledge and finds precedents in the merging of cultures as when Rome conquered Greece or the renaissance rediscovered the classics. 

Baraniuk (2006) notes that the LP has been superseded by a digital music culture which is characterised by a creative process of rip, mix and burn. 

Ripping is defined by wikipedia as a "process of copying". In some contexts such as where intellectual property rights exist this can be illegal.  In other cases it can be unethical (eg in an academic context unattributed copying is plagiarism).  But Blakley (2010) points out a "culture of copying" makes the fashion industry massively innovative.

Mixing or remixing is the creative part of the process.  An audio track can be remixed by breaking it down into its components, subtracting some and adding others. Shakespearean plays are often remixed by reinterpreting them into a new context; the extent to which this is done can lead to the new version being regarded simply as a new edit or as a work in its own right such as Verdi's Otello or Porter's Kiss Me, Kate. 

Burning is the process of recording the audio track.

Expanding the metaphor

I want to reinterpret (which is in itself a type of remixing) this process as a metaphor about learning. Specifically, I want to explore ripping as the transmissive aspect of education, mixing as the collaborative aspect and burning as the production of the end product.

Sanger (2010) explores the difference between information and knowledge. An unread text represents information but it is not until the student has learned it by reading it and understanding it in the context of the student's schema that this information becomes knowledge. The reading (the 'ripping') is not enough. The student needs to remix it by analysing (disassembling) the text, examining each component, and then synthesising the new ideas with their own previous knowledge before it can be burned into their brain. 

Although Sanger (2010; p20) attacks collaborative learning ("It is one thing to engage in a discussion .... but it is quite another to think creatively and critically for oneself"), he is not attacking the belief that dialogues and structured conversations can facilitate learning. Considering ideas from alternative points of view is an important strategy in mixing. As Cascio (2009) suggests, a "proliferation of diverse voices may actually improve our overall ability to think." I think Sanger is saying that the iconic status of collaborative learning is blinding people to the fact that mixing is not enough; that ripping and burning are essential parts of the process of learning.

I think Sanger would see parallels between his ideas and those of Thornburg (2004). Thornburg suggests that in our hunter-gatherer past there were three types of primitive pedagogy:

• The campfire around which an elder of the tribe sat and told stories which has evolved into the lecture or the presentation; transmissive education or ripping;
• The watering-hole where people gossiped which has evolved into the seminar, the campus-cafe or the academic common room; collaborative co-construction of understanding, or mixing;
• The cave where individuals sat and thought through the long, dark, lonely nights which has evolved into the study-bedroom; for Sanger this is the "essentially solitary"  moment when learning is achieved.

Sloman (2001; p116) adds a fourth pedagogy to Thornburg's triad:

• The hunting party where young hunters honed their skills under the supervision of the old has evolved into the lab.

This is useful because there are some aspects or types of learning where discussion is not enough and where practical activities take precedence so I see Sloman's hunting-party as an alternative to or an elaboration of Thornburg's watering-hole. 

So learning appears to be a three-part process:

• Ripping at the campfire where ideas are transmitted;
• Mixing at the watering -hole or on the hunting-party where ideas are pulled apart, examined from different perspectives; and reassembled in novel ways;
• Burning in the cave where learning is consolidated.

Perhaps we can understand this better if we see learning as a process of disturbing the equilibrium of a system. Gladwell (2000; p259) believes that what he calls social epidemics depend on three sorts of people: 

• ‘Connectors’, who cultivate friendships;
• ‘Mavens’, who have acknowledged in-depth expertise such that other people will take their advice;
• ‘Salesmen’, who know how to persuade.

In the twittersphere, Connectors will have lots of followers and will also follow lots of others; Mavens will follow a lot of others but not have many followers; and Salesmen will follow few but have lots of followers.

Rather than see these as three different sorts of people, let us imagine them as one person undergoing the three stages of a learning process. In the transmissive phase you are trying to learn so you greedily suck information in from wherever you can; you are a Maven, you follow many. In the mixing phase you want to discuss your ideas as widely as possible, to rip them up and cast them upon the waters and see what comes back. This is the Connecting phase. Finally you burn your ideas by Selling them to as many people as possible.

This should also be true for good e-learning:

• Information is presented to students using text, video, slide presentation or audio podcast (many authorities seem to concentrate entirely upon this transmissive, instructional process);
• The students discuss the information using chat rooms, discussion forums, wikis, or sl seminars
• The students then create their own paper, or blog, or artefact.

Exploration of concepts around the metaphor

Ripping

What exactly is the ripping process? It is more than just the passive receipt of transmitted knowledge? If we compare learning to the creation of a meal, ripping is the assembling of the ingredients. As such there is an important element of selection about it. We need to know what to rip. We choose whom to follow on twitter and google reader.

In this contest we can understand some aspects of the role of the teacher in this ‘ripping’ phase. He is the transmitter of knowledge, the storyteller, the sage on the stage. As such he needs performance and presentation skills to improve the “stickiness” of the information he is presenting (Gladwell 2000; p259). But in this role he has also selected the ingredients of the knowledge meal he is serving. Of course, more mature or more self-directed learners will expect to choose their own ingredients. Perhaps the art of teaching is guiding the learner to make the ‘right’ selection.

What should the ingredients look like? Do they need to be chopped up? If so how big should the chunks be? There seems very little objective research done on how long a lesson should last and teacher surveys seem to suggest that the ideal length is:

• Whatever the teacher has been used to;
• Dependent on the pupil age;
• Dependent on the subject.

On the other hand, the popularity of Twitter has led to speculation that mixing very small bits of knowledge might improve learning. Jarche (2010) suggests that small bits will engender more creative mixes: “Twitter strips bare our communication by limiting it to 140 character bursts which gradually meld into a stream from which patterns emerge. These patterns are not intended or designed by the originator, but sensed by the observer.” Junco et al (2010) show that using Twitter increases grades among college students although this seems to be due to increased engagement in the mixing part of the learning process. The knowledge they were seeking to transmit was normal sized although an abstract of their paper helpfully uses sections of no more than 140 characters.


Rankin (2009) considers to what extent size matters in her Twitter based Political Science class: “140 characters does limit the types of comments that they’re able to make and the types of evidence and argument that they’re able to make to back up their opinions and there are some issues that we’re discussing in class that do require a more in-depth approach towards explaining one’s position but on the other hand oftentimes there’s a lot of miscellaneous information that students think they need to throw in the kind of muddle up the idea they’re trying to portray so having to keep them limited to 140 characters does require students to get at the absolute central point.”

One of the 'Laws of Mind Mapping' is to use single words. Chambers (2009) suggests that  “a single word can come up with far more associations than a phrase or a sentence can. A sentence locks the meaning of a word into a very restrictive area whereas the word on its own can generate far more ideas.”

Mixing

In the alchemy of learning, mixing is perhaps the most obscure phase. Is it like a chemical reaction in which the selected reactant molecules encounter one another, break their interatomic bonds, rearrange and rebond to form new products? Is it like cooking in which you process the ingredients using a variety of techniques at a variety of temperatures for a variety of times? In other words: what are the conditions under which collaborative ‘watering-hole’ learning is most effective?

Does mixing have to be interpersonal? To some extent it must be, because the ideas that are being mixed will have arisen from different people. But the ideals of collaborative learning, which seems to be the paradigm of the waterhole, are that people learn if they discuss and debate. Black (2000; p409) talks about “enrichment through communal interaction” and Shirky (2008; p109) states that "Collaborative production, where people have to coordinate with one another to get anything done, is considerably harder than simple sharing, but the results can be more profound." (p109) Nevertheless it is clear to me as I write this paper that I am mixing ideas and learning whilst totally solitary. Equally the ‘hunting party’ mode of learning suggested by Sloman (2001; p116) which I suggested could be an alternative to the watering-hole could also be undertaken alone. In this case one is testing one’s ideas against something external, as a scientist tests his theories against nature.

To what extent should the ingredients be compatible? Do the pieces have to have an affinity for one another? It is clear that it is difficult to mix two cultures that are very different; it engenders misunderstanding, distrust and hostility. On the other hand, there is nothing to be gained by mixing two components that are identical. For a learning event to occur, the components have to be different but not too different. Is there an ideal degree of difference? Perhaps it is like a network. Krebs (2010) states that in a network, more than two steps is considered to be ‘over the horizon’: “After one step the message begins to grow fuzzy, after two it is becoming very noisy, and after three it is basically useless -- background hum. We might be all separated by six degrees but it is the first two steps that really matter." But how do we determine the degree of difference for two items of knowledge?

Schank (2010) believes that telling stories is what we do which links in very well with Thornburg's camfire. But Schank also says: "Comprehension means mapping your stories onto my stories and vice versa. .... You can't really communicate very well with someone whose stories are very different." (10m30s)

Presumably it is the extent to which the ideas are compatible which will reinforce or answer Sunstein’s (2007) concern that the movement towards personalisation will lead to each of us entrenching our positions within our mental ghettoes.

If we continue to think of learning as a network we might also consider the analysis of social networking conducted by Shirky (2008) in which he deduced a power law governing the amount of participation; compatible with the Long Tail as described by Anderson (2006).

Is learning like crowdsourcing in which a community of users develop ideas, for example the Global Ideas Bank (http://www.globalideasbank.org/site/home/). Is wiki or open source software development like learning?

Burning

In some ways burning seems to be the most trivial part of learning. I am presently burning my ripped and mixed ideas into this essay although I am conscious I am still mixing as I write (and I regularly follow up an idea online to rip another thought). Burning is more than just serving the cooked meal? It is a truism that you never really understand a subject until you have taught it. Burning involves the crystallisation of thought; it is the process of the learner taking ownership of the ideas he is learning.

What are the ideal conditions for burning? In my case it is quiet, solitude and a lot of walking (I wander corridors at work when I am thinking). Are the creation facilities offered by the web (blogs, writing tools, artefact creation tools) necessary or appropriate for burning?

Summary

I have tried to show that a ‘rip, mix, burn’ metaphor for learning mirrors, to some extent, the process of learning. I have explored some of the details of this model in greater detail and have posed a number of questions which I hope might stimulate further thinking and concept creation.

References

Anderson C (2006) The Long Tail Random House London

Baraniuk R 2006  Open Source learning TED talks available at http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning.html accessed 24th October 2010

Black P, 2000 Research and the Development of Educational Assessment in Oxford Review of Education 26:3&4 pp407- 419

Blakley J 2010 Lessons from fashion's free culture TECX USC available at http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html accessed 18th October 2010

Cascio J 2009 Get Smarter Atlantic Magazine July/August 2009


Chambers P (2009) What aspects of a mind map make it creative? (YouTube video) available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_WILF5z38s&feature=channel

Gladwell M  2000 The Tipping Point Abacus London

Jarche H 2010 Making connections blog post 9^th November 2010 Life in Perpetual Beta available at http://www.jarche.com/2010/11/making-connections/ accessed 9^th November 2010

Junco R, Heiberger G & Loken E (2010) The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades Journal of Computer Assisted Learning available to download from http://blog.reyjunco.com/pdf/JuncoHeibergerLokenTwitterEngagementGrades.pdf accessed 13th November 2010

Krebs V 2010a Spread of Influence in a Network blog post 27th February 2010 TNT - The Network Thinkers http://www.thenetworkthinkers.com/ accessed 7th November 2010

Manovich, L. (2005). Remixing and Remixability. http://www.manovich.net/


Rankin M 2009 The Twitter Experiment (YouTube video) available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WPVWDkF7U8&feature=related accessed 14^th November 2010

Sanger, L. (2010). Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age. Educause Review, March/April 2010. pp14-24) http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM1020.pdf


Schank R (2010) Negotiation across cultures Keynote speech at DARPA 10th August 2010 part 1 on YouTube available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FISlbJKkN5U accessed 14th November 2010

Shirky C 2008 Personal motivation meets collaborative production pp109-142 from Shirky C 2008 Here comes everybody; the power of organizing without organizations  London Penguin 

Sloman M 2001 The e-learning revolution: from propositions to action Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development London 0-85292-873-4

Sunstein, C. (2007). The Daily Me, in Republic.com 2.0. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Thornburg D 2004 Campfires in Cyberspace: Primordial metaphors for learning in the 21st Century International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning 1:10 available at http://itdl.org/journal/oct_04/invited01.htm accessed 24th October 2010

wikipedia Ripping available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripping accessed 28th October 2010