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Metaphors arising out of blogging practice offer a much-needed alternative to the popular deep/surface “approaches to learning model”. Tamsin Haggis (2002) has pointed out that this model, first developed by Marton and Saljo (1984), has attracted surprisingly little critique and has slowly assumed an almost uncontested status as the dominant paradigm guiding policy and research on teaching and learning in higher education in Europe and Australia. Even supporters of the model admit that it has become so ubiquitous that it runs the risk of becoming a cliché (Richardson quoted in Haggis 2002).

However for all its apparent simplicity the deep/surface binary is little more than a deceptive tag for a confusingly complex body of research. Vivien Beattie (1997) and colleagues have pointed out that the “model” is actually an umbrella for four inter-related theories produced by four separate research centres.

Noel Entwistle (1997:214) one of the researchers associated with the approach attributes its uncontested and widespread uptake to “the need in staff development to start from a simple and powerful idea which conveys complex pedagogical principles in readily accessible ways”.

Entwistle is right. There is much that is attractive, powerful and familiar in this literature. At first glance Entwistle’s description of a deep approach to learning seems strikingly similar to many of the ideas that I have been discussing in the rest of this paper:

A deep approach derives, from the intention to understand ideas for oneself, by relating ideas to previous knowledge and experience, looking for patterns and underlying principles, checking evidence and relating it to conclusions and examining logic and argument cautiously and critically. (Entwistle 1997:214)

Although at a basic level this is a “meaning-making” theory of education, its techno-rational orientation can be deduced from its language of caution. There is little sense of adventurism and only a weak sense of individual agency – the learner is seen to merely look for underlying patterns rather than to actively make connections. As Haggis observes:

One of the fundamental problems with the view of learning that the model presents is that it removes the individual learner from the richness and complexity of his/her multiple contexts. It also constructs ‘the learner’ as a being passively created by ‘past experience’, and passively amenable to reconstruction as a ‘deep’ learner through a new set of molding processes that take place within the university. The learner, in this model, is a human being without agency. (Haggis 2002:98)

Many of the problems that Haggis and other critics of the model (Webb 1997) point to are inherent in the metaphoric terms that Entwistle claims are so “simple and powerful”. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have pointed out that metaphors are not neutral; they play a critical role in both producing and constraining our thinking.

The deep/surface approach uses an essentialist metaphor that relates learning to the search for an abstract buried treasure. The truth is out there (deep space) or under there (deep sea) if only the seeker is prepared to dive/fly far enough. In this metaphor truth or knowledge is clearly a “thing” that is not easily found (it’s not close by or near the surface) but it is something that definitely does exist and it’s something that requires struggle to attain.

In spatial terms the deep/surface metaphor is a vertical metaphor, which directs the search above, below or even “deep inside” and as such it is marked as distinctly individualist, with the learner upright and isolated. It lacks any sense of horizontal connectivity.

Although the web is sometimes described as a deep space it’s essential characteristic is that of a horizontal network, “web” being a spatially expansive horizontal metaphor.

Blogging can help us to understand some of the practices and principles behind the deep/surface approaches literature but does so under the guise of a new metaphor.

Blogging exemplifies an ecological model: linked, networked, embedded, organic even viral are suitable metaphors to describe this approach and its web of connectivity. A linked or network approach to learning encourages an understanding that seeks to recognize patterns and build on relationships with other knowledge domains, but unlike Entwistle’s approach these relationships are not sought in abstract deep space. They are sought in a set of loosely mapped known and unknown adjacent spaces each only a link or series of links away.

In a linked or networked approach to learning the sense of agency and individuality is powerful but it is not isolating or egocentric. Each node in a dynamic network has the ability to both send and receive therefore this metaphor better accounts for both the given (or contextual) and the constructed aspects of the learning process.

In Jacobsen’s (2002) terms the deep/surface metaphor clearly outlines a literary model: disembodied, abstract, hierarchical, individual. Whereas linked or network learning represents the virtual, dynamic, emergent, idiosyncratic characteristics of cyberdiscursivity.

From a conference paper:
"Blogging as pedagogic practice: artefact and ecology,"
Blog Talk Downunder May 2005.
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