Emerging from the fog...?

I can't help thinking that I should be pleased with having made Stage 2 of my doctoral studies, but instead I've been thrown back into 'conscious incompetence' mode. Just when I thought I was starting to get the hang of this, I realise that there's still a long way to go, and that the direction is still uncertain.

I haven't blogged in a while and maybe that's also something to do with it? I got immersed into the practical research tasks, got some interesting data, but stopped thinking in the bigger picture or philosophical sense of what I was trying to do..

However, discovering a book by Larry Hickman on John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology has taken me full circle again to where I started  out - Dewey's instrumentalism and pragmatism - and I'm starting to reformat my original thoughts about the digital Dewey.

The doctoral thesis has got to be so much more than an evaluation of a piece of work, no matter no national or how extensive. Dewey has to be the link here, and his definition of technology - remember that he died in 1952, 30 years before the birth of the internet - is one that will be interesting to test against the 21st century.

In digital terms, Dewey viewed change and growth as a norm and he believed that social experimentation rather than absolute principles, was needed to assess the worth of an idea or practice. For him, learning occurs through the construction, reconstruction and reorganisation of experiences to find meaning, and to enable the individual to influence and direct future situations. Here, the role of the educator is to provide the  learner  with opportunities to learn ' the instruments of effective self-direction' - a sensibility to social issues and an ability to act on them. Yet another argument for the digital youth worker?