Rupert Röder

The Computer as a Medium of Didactics

On the Myths of Technical Media and the Learning of Subjects

Contents

1. Introduction: Didactical computer media residing in the blind spot of science

2. Kantian preliminaries: Rationality in the sciences versus the reasonable acting of subjects

2.1 Scientific production of knowledge as a projective technical process

2.2 Rational action led by freedom and the moral law

2.3 The double inner discourse of reason and the Kantian foundation of moral sciences

2.4 How are technical media of didactics possible?

3. 'Working on the myths of media' as a provisionary meta-theoretical approach.

3.1 Averted conceptions of coupling mind and nature with Kant

3.2 'Myths' as organizing centers of thinking

3.3 On the pragmatic function and truth of 'myths'

3.4 Mythological enlightenment, enlighted mythology - an interpretation of the concept of myth based on the 'Dialectic of Enlightenment'

3.5 Analytical work on myths.

4. Prelude in the 17^th century: The discourse of media with Comenius.

4.1 Reconstructing world and man based on the model of the clock

4.2 Myth of the mechanic character of pedagogic action

4.3 'Media' in the Comenian didactics

4.4 About the word history of 'medium'

4.5 Myth of the mental engram as a piece of world-representation

4.6 Variants of the mechanics of media

5. Modern myths of the pedagogical (computer) medium

5.1 Technical media as the fascinosum of didactics in the sixties.

5.2 Myth of mathematically conceivable information

5.3 Myth of information media.

5.4 Myths of the teaching machine

5.5 Ambivalencies and aporias of the mechanics of teaching

5.6 The concept of the didactical medium as frame and space of teaching and learning

6. Cognitivistic myths

6.1 Postulating a 'deep' modelling of cognitive behaviour in psycholoy and linguistics

6.2 The Turing myth: adequate modelling of human thought in a computer calculus

6.3 The myth of the learning 'child machine', 'strang loops' and the fragile identity of reflexion

6.4 'Knowledge processing' and 'Knowledge acquisition' as circular concepts of Cognitive Psychology, Artificial Intelligence and Pedagogics

6.5 'Intelligent tutorial systems' and 'artificial learners' as 'objectivations' of the process of learning

6.6 Symbol systems, semiotic processes and Gavriel Salomon's myth of code supplantation

6.7 Emergences of cognitivism

7. Perspectives for instrumentality in the context of pedagogic action

7.1 The 'Critique of Judgement', unleashing Kantian philosophy

7.2 The lust of knowing in the social activity of free imagination – Kant's second vision of subjectivity

7.3 The moral-esthetic versus the esthetic-perceiving, learning subject: Pedagogical options

7.4 Myth of the learning of subjects

7.5 Myth of weak instrumentality of media objects in learning processes

7.6 Preserving the dualism of medium and esthetic subject

8. Subject and media object exemplarily shown in some media constructions

8.1 Media for learning the art of programming: The roles of subject and media object in the concepts of the didactic function of programming languages

8.2 Media for instructing the 'common user': Subjects and media objects in the concepts for graphical user interfaces for software products

8.3 Approaching a phenomenoly of subject and media object

8.4 Attractors for world perceiving: On didactic software for 'modelling and simulation' and further examples for projective media

8.5 Sensual forms of blankness: On text editing systems and other examples of evocative media

9. Résumé: Dissipating the structural terra incognita of human and technical science.