_Learning and teaching have similarities. Learning can operate without teaching and, as many educators have experienced, teaching can operate without learning. The terms indicate a flow of data and the roles of the participants. They also suggest intention of the agents.
A way of thinking about it is to consider information, skills, etc to be pushed or pulled or both. The pull version is where the learner has the intent of acquisition and draws out the information from the model possibly by imitation. The push, on the other hand, is where the teacher’s intent is to bestow knowledge on the pupil. The ideal educational context involves both push and pull.
These information flows, from one person to another, are clearly memetic. We can posit that push and pull offer two modes of meme motility. The pull mode of meme motility would be represented by one person imitating another as children often do, whether the adult wants them to calk their behaviour or not. The push mode is where one person wants the instil some behaviour in another. Religious indoctrination is an example.
Both modes allow memes to flow, but in the push mode, the motor function may be a component of the memeplex. Evangelical sects illustrate how the collaboration between the core doctrine is packaged with the drive to proselytise. Such a package that pushes itself would have an advantage over one that relies on being pulled.
Multi-level marketing also exemplifies push as recruiting distributors is built into the compensation plan. Viral marketing used the push mode. An efficient means of conveying a complex though is a hybrid mode. One component of the memeplex pushes an incentive for the recipient to pull the rest of the memeplex. Variations on these propagation strategies exist, which I Have called and after microprocessor assembly language terminology, addressing modes.
Leave a Reply