HIGHLIGHT #2 | 118
HIGHLIGHT | #2
Title
Locating the Babel Fish: In search
of ubiquity within the agency of
the 21st Century Teacher
Author(s)
Philip Devine
Contact
[email protected]
Department
Information Technology
Abstract
“The Babel fish is small, yellow,
leech-like, and probably the oddest
thing in the Universe. It feeds on
brainwave energy received not from
its own carrier, but from those around
it. It absorbs all unconscious mental
frequencies from this brainwave
energy to nourish itself with. It then
excretes into the mind of its carrier a
telepathic matrix formed by combining
the conscious thought frequencies
with nerve signals picked up from the
speech centres of the brain which has
supplied them. The practical upshot
of all this is that if you stick a Babel
fish in your ear you can instantly
understand anything said to you in
any form of language. The speech
patterns you actually hear decode the
brainwave matrix which has been fed
into your mind by your Babel fish.”
(The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
Douglas Adams, 1979)
Introducing the Babel Fish:
The aim of this paper is to begin to explore and locate possible
future guises, roles, locations and methodologies of the 21st
Century teacher within a technological matrix, physical and
virtual. Three themes will be used to locate the ‘Babel Fish’; these
are Facilitation, Instruction and Analytic Meaning. The metaphor
of the Babel Fish will be used to bring into focus the relationship
between teaching and the compound nature of disambiguation
through translation, linking the reverse metaphor of translation
in computer science to the metaphorical discourse that bounds
research and discovery.
“Metaphor performs essential functions in orienting
and guiding thought; it connects abstraction and
embodiment; it allows us to discover regularities
between what we perceive and what exists outside of
ourselves; and it entwines cultural presuppositions with
scientific frameworks.”
(Hayles, 2001, p.144)
Introducing the teacher (or lecturer) as a translator of knowledge
into learning within an analogue and digital context, I define
translator or translation as disambiguation to deliver a semantic
interpretation, a communication of meaning for learning to
take place. The metaphor of translation can also be seen to be
echoed in computing, defined by ‘the analysis of source text
without human intervention’, with disambiguation in computing
being defined as a set of possible techniques to eliminate name
ambiguity, and as terminology that defines machine memory
access instructions.
I will now (briefly) visualise the context of the analogue teacher
or lecturer as a translator of knowledge to deliver meaning
in learning, and juxtapose that analogue interpretation of
translation with ubiquitous computing, defined by Crang and
Graham (2007, p. 789) as “a world of ambient intelligence”,
thus beginning to illuminate what the future may hold for the
21st Century teacher. It is widely accepted that the analogue
teacher is bound by the constraints of the industrial revolution,
a production-line methodology where the product, the learner,
is assembled and then classified (by examination) on departure
from the factory (Robinson, RSA, 2010) (a). The generation of
the analogue learner is carried out mostly within the classroom
(or lecture theatre) by one or more teachers (or translators).
Here the analogue teacher is the sole arbiter of knowledge,
drowning in the entropy of chalk and talk, as echoed by Mark
Twain; “College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go
straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through