This document summarizes a keynote address about rethinking educational research in the 21st century. It discusses how knowledge is no longer a linear progression but a discontinuous process of disruption and starting over. It also discusses how learning is an emergent property of complex systems, in which embodied minds transform information through social and dialogical activity. Finally, it concludes that a semiotic perspective can provide insights into how interpretive systems transform information into knowledge through learning.

1. Biosemiotics, Technology, Social Media and Learning:
Rethinking educational research in the 21st Century
Stanley Frielick
Keynote address to the
AUT School of Education Research Conference
6 September 2010

2. Complexity - Embodiment - Enactivism - Intersubjectivity
Knowledge in an age of uncertainty
Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for
cutting......
This “cutting edge,” of knowledge is no longer a smooth, linear
progression towards truth, understanding and certainty (as the
notion of “scientific progress” usually implies) but a process of
discontinuity, a process of being disrupted, interrupted, and starting
again. It is a process of cutting through assumed continuities,

3. Complexity - Embodiment - Enactivism - Intersubjectivity
Knowledge in an age of uncertainty
Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for
cutting......
This “cutting edge,” of knowledge is no longer a smooth, linear
progression towards truth, understanding and certainty (as the
notion of “scientific progress” usually implies) but a process of
discontinuity, a process of being disrupted, interrupted, and starting
again. It is a process of cutting through assumed continuities,

4. Francisco Varela
The Embodied Mind
Mind in Life (Thompson)
enactivism
Extract from Varela documentary
Monte Grande (copyright)
http://www.mindandlife.org/media.mtg06.html

6. Fragment from
reflective journal -
first teaching
practicum. April,1982

7. Fragment from
reflective journal -
first teaching
practicum. April,1982

8. Fragment from
reflective journal -
first teaching
practicum. April,1982

9. Fragment from
reflective journal -
first teaching
practicum. April,1982
Education should above all
instill into pupils equip
pupils with the resources
to discover some sense of
what it means to be alive
and why we are alive

11. Break the pattern which connects
the items of learning and you
necessarily destroy all quality…
(Bateson 1979: 16)
Gregory Bateson
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity
link to Bateson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLuADL0ssnc

13. Teacher-centred Student-centred
REACTIVE CONSTRUCTIVE
dualist epistemology of the individual
as constructor of meaning who is essenAally
autonomous and separate from the world

14. Teacher-centred Student-centred
REACTIVE CONSTRUCTIVE
dualist epistemology of the individual
as constructor of meaning who is essenAally
autonomous and separate from the world

15. Biggs, J. B (1999)

17. STUDENT/S
SUBJECT
TEACHER/S

18. STUDENT/S
SUBJECT
TEACHER/S

19. STUDENT/S
SUBJECT
TEACHER/S

24. Learning is a complex process in which embodied minds
enact transformations of information by engaging in social
and dialogical activity.
Knowledge is an emergent property of a learning system.
Knowledge is for cutting, expanding and opening up the
space of the possible.

25. Biosemiotics is the explication of the embodied and complex
signifying / interpretive systems that enact the transformation
of information into knowledge in the process of learning.
These interpretive systems are apparent on at least 7 levels:
1. the digital transmission of information by DNA from one generation to another;
2. epigenesis of the phenotype from the DNA influenced by signals from the environment;
3. the process by which receptors of prokaryotes interpret signals from the environment;
4. the biosemiosis of learning by virtue of the emergence of a central nervous system in animals;
5. the transition from percept-based thought to concept-based symbolic thought that emerged contemporaneously with
human speech;
6. the sociosemiosis of human society or culture, a symbolic based phenomenon; and
7. the semiotics of human generated signs both spoken and notated. Logan, R. (2007). The Origin and Evolution of Language and the Propagation of Or-
ganization. tripleC 5(2): 75-81 http://tripleC.uti.at

26. Kevin Kelly
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines (1995)
What Technology Wants (2010)
link to Kevin Kelly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap-ZC21bk18

27. danah boyd
apophenia - http://www.zephoria.org
zephoria on twitter
link to danah boyd
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW3_JhQksv4

28. In her analysis of internet culture and identity Turkle (1995) shows how
the earlier theories of Jacques Lacan were given concrete and immediate
form in the worlds of online multiplayer chat games, where users adopted
different identities in the medium of onscreen text. The internet made
Lacanian theory visible in a compelling and unexpected way. In the
same sense one can argue that the understandings of student learning
emerging in the 70s / 80s from phenomenography, the relational
perspective, and the systems view of constructive alignment are
forerunners of a new understanding of learning – now manifesting via the
internet in the increasingly networked world of a university that is rapidly
changing in response to new technologies, global issues, and increasing
demands for relevance and innovation in the curriculum. Enactive
coherence thus includes the new affordances of technology for
enhancing student learning.

37. “To conclude … on a semiotic note, and drawing on an image
from Samuel Butler, I would observe that an academic is a
sign’s way of spawning further, more developed academics. The
administration’s task is to ensure that this process works
smoothly. There are two fundamental strategies to accomplish
these ends: first, by publishing and teaching as much as possible;
and, equally important, by doing one’s best to facilitate the
success of one’s colleagues in these respects. ” - Thomas A. Sebeok
Kull K. (2003). Thomas A. Sebeok and biology: Building biosemiotics. Cybernetics & Human Knowing, 10, 47-60.

38. Image: 'I am Here for the Learning Revolution'
Image: 'Heart cells' Image: 'Abandoned School' www.flickr.com/photos/31442459@N00/2516648940
www.flickr.com/photos/31962840@N00/2679987023 www.flickr.com/photos/96447062@N00/209582519
Image: 'Teaching is listening, learning is talking'
Image: 'Communication' Image: 'Window To The Soul' www.flickr.com/photos/10838559@N00/4612194068
www.flickr.com/photos/35707686@N06/3474643866 www.flickr.com/photos/71038389@N00/2787109136
Image: 'Prüfungsstunde'
Image: 'Phones' Image: 'Neurons, In Vitro Color!' www.flickr.com/photos/12143758@N00/96361849
www.flickr.com/photos/21947880@N00/124418044 www.flickr.com/photos/51994225@N00/2798522576
Image: 'Teaching Math or Something'
Image: 'Stained Glass Window' Image: 'Blue Riverdamsel'
www.flickr.com/photos/82312837@N00/466713478
www.flickr.com/photos/45359107@N00/3111823929 www.flickr.com/photos/9643110@N08/4243393863
Image: '034/365 exam week is here again'
Image: 'DNA sculpture at Centre for Life' Image: 'Macro'
www.flickr.com/photos/8542711@N08/4328473236
www.flickr.com/photos/55238998@N00/1251845255 www.flickr.com/photos/81073027@N00/2603669265
Image: 'DNA replication' Image: 'Charles Darwin'
www.flickr.com/photos/7702002@N08/2575936407 www.flickr.com/photos/35752108@N00/2262636867
Image: 'Social Media 01' http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/Uex_photo_full.jpg
www.flickr.com/photos/32931740@N06/3256859352
Image: 'Bubbling water'
Image: 'Monkey See Monkey Do' www.flickr.com/photos/12836528@N00/3589122012
www.flickr.com/photos/37523824@N06/3633661333
Image: 'Velocidad de Obturación. Prueba 1-B'
Image: '::Books have knowledge, knowledge is
www.flickr.com/photos/23394122@N06/3695817588
power, power+corrupts,+corruption+is+a+crime,,,::'
www.flickr.com/photos/66548401@N00/4053097146
Image attributions on flickrcc
for slides and audio
see www.enactivist.net
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