Learning as some kind of change

As a dubious remedy for my eLoneliness, Facebook came along. It’s like ordering spam, but the spam is knitted out of stuff from your social life or, more likely, from your social past. So you keep returning. It’s a sort of politeness. And the interface is perfect for people like me (almost half way there, at least if we don’t stop a lot of things or start believing (even more) heavily in medical science): Simple, clean cut, easy to navigate and usable for a lot of things you didn’t really have to do.

Last week I attended a course called “Learning and identity.” As usual such a “wide” header attracts very different people and some of them seemed to have a quite different understanding of both these concepts than I have. Some spoke of grasping “how people really are,” “behinds the mask” and so on. I don’t know much about such grasping, but from my perspective identity is more like Gees “packages;” made and remade by us seeing trough them and living in them.

“Core identity” is not what I’m looking for. And neither is it what was meant with “identity” in the course header. But one of the discussions was interesting. I claimed, backed up by a nice citation from Bateson, that the “word learning (.) denotes change of some kind.” And “identity,” even if you see as a very dynamic entity, isn’t. The word identity is not pointing at change per se (rather the opposite). If learning takes place, it may be called a subcategory of change; it is the change we are talking about. Some other participants talked about how “we should not think in boxes” and argued we must focus on the similarities rather than the differences (being a fan of Bateson I obviously raged).

What is changing? I guess that is what much of the discussion in educational and learning research is all about. Probably a lot of things are changing for learning to occur. Mapping them all might be impossible. But I don’t think you need to map everything to talk sensible about learning and identity. What I have to do is “draw the borders,” finding how much I need to take into account.