Abstract
The emergence of Web 2.0 and some of its ascendant tools such as blogs and wikis have the potential to dramatically change education, both in how we conceptualize and operationalize processes and strategies. We argue in this paper that it is a change that has been over a century in coming. The promise of the Web 2.0 is similar to ideas proposed by Pragmatists such as Charles Peirce and John Dewey. Peirce proposed the logic of abduction as critical for the types of unique/progressive thinking that leads to creative problem solving and/or discovery. While logic based in deduction offers outcomes with certainty, logic based in abduction offers potentially valuable insights. Dewey tried to implement progressive education in the classrooms. Dewey’s ideas, while influential, were often misunderstood, or considered too idealistic and/or unworkable in the traditional classrooms. Logics based in abduction required that different major premises and hypotheses for problem solving be held simultaneously and over time. This type of scenario is often times difficult if not impossible in education based on direct interactions. Hypertext, especially as capture through emerging tools of Web 2.0, may offer the technologies that enable the type of information based networks within the education process that promote abduction and the democratic classroom as Dewey envisioned.
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In this paper we concentrate on only two tools, blogs and wikis, because we believe them to be the most relevant for education processes, but Web 2.0 is much larger in scope (including platforms such as Google Documents and Double Click) and still very much in its infancy.
Peirce actually used three different labels for this “third” logic (after deduction and induction) (Paavola 2004). Early in his career he referred to this third logic as hypothesis (inference). Later in his career, because of confusion about how Aristotle used the term, he switched to retroduction. During the period when Peirce’s thinking was most closely aligned with the early development of Pragmatism (last decade of 19th century, first decade of 20th century (Menand 2001)) he used the word abduction. Primarily for that reason we used the label abduction in this paper.
In this paper when we use the term logic we are talking about any cohesive thinking structure(s) that guide the way that we recognize and understand the world around us. Logic is very close to the concept of cognitive architectures proposed by Connectionists (Rumelhart and McClelland 1986), systems theorists (Bateson 1979), and/or network theorists (Sun 2002)—interrelated pieces of information that coalesce through experience, interconnections, and preferential attachments (Barabasi 2003) into a defined, active, and engaged system for organizing the world.
There are only three logics for Peirce—deduction, induction and abduction, and abduction has its roots in Pragmatism. It might be possible to make the argument that a theorist such as Vygotsky actually promotes inductive problem solving, but that is a discussion for another time.
This is why abduction is different from just multi-voice perspectives (Bakhtin 1981). Abduction is not just about recognizing other perspectives but organizing them in an attempt to differentiate the best possible hypothesis.
By value we mean relative economic worth is solving a problem along Peirce’s idea about an “economy of research.”
The relationship between Peirce and Dewey was contentious.
It is useless to try and determine who influenced whom. The record for this type of historical understanding simply does not exist at this point.
Dewey never used Peirce’s label of abduction for his logic of discovery. This may have been the result of Dewey’s resistance to Peirce’s sometimes obscure word use. For example Dewey was very resistant to the label Pragmatism which is one of the reasons he started calling his own work Instrumentalism (Menand 2001).
We would make the argument that the report “A Nation at Risk” (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983) gave deduction preeminence as educational strategy and goal that it has not relinquished.
We define node as defined information source. A node can be as small as information in the mind or as large as an institution. What is critical is that there is equivalence between nodes in a given network such as a “classroom.” For the most part in this paper, it refers to humans acting within a socially defined network.
Kuhn (1962) actually outlined this idea when describing the way in which scientists hold on to a paradigm for as long as possible.
Some blog posters are already famous having established other arenas for out links such as traditional or social media and therefore do not need out-power to establish hub status.
The Semantic Web actually has a much broader meaning than we are using in the confines of this paper. Currently the relevance of web pages on the Web is judged primarily through mathematical algorithms. The web pages with the highest level of links are determined as the most important and when you do a search these are the first pages to which you are directed (increasing the “power” of the page). Vinton Cerf, sometimes considered as the “father of the internet,” argues that this idea of Page Ranking is flawed because it is based on numbers rather than human judgment (Stross 2009). The Semantic web would replace numbered pages rankings with actual human generated phrases that describe the page or a group of pages. Technology has not yet caught up to this idea in broad based networks, but use of the Semantic Web can be a powerful tool in small networks such as those developed out of class activity.
A URL simply locates a resource. This means that a URL can often be a string of letters that has no other function than to take you to the information being sought. A URI both locates information and names it so that it has a specific, recognizable identity.
Vygotsky (1987) has a discussion of how cultural-based differences in the audience’s sense of a single word can change the entire meaning of an entire story.
A couple of years ago, a colleague in a well-known but controversial field of social sciences complained about a related entry in Wikipedia. Academics in the field offered up alternative hypotheses and most of the entry migrated to the discussion page. On a recent visit to the entry page, I found the end product still relatively short while the discussion continued on.
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Glassman, M., Kang, M.J. The logic of wikis: The possibilities of the Web 2.0 classroom. Computer Supported Learning 6, 93–112 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-011-9107-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-011-9107-y