Construction of the semiotic optimum in students’ notes (on the example of an open lecture on ethics in a philosophy course)

The beginning and end of this article record two literary examples, the meanings of which are conceptually interpretated. The first example – the Unseen University – captures the problem of domestic education caused by ignoring the essence of education. According to the authors, the essence of education is that education systems (of any scale) are self-organizing systems; the mechanisms of their self-organization are information processes (they represent an invariant sequence of stages); each stage of the information process expresses the result of its “work” in a semiotic form. The invariant sequence of stages strictly distributes the characteristics of information by which it is possible to judge the achievement of a “semiotic optimum” (a concept proposed by the authors) in the structure of the educational process at a particular university. These characteristics lead not so much to some kind of pedagogical innovation but rather serve to define the application boundaries for many techniques – those application boundaries that often remain “unseen”. To a first approximation, these characteristics represent the dependences of education results on the interpretation of what the goals of education subjects’ actions express. Therefore, the condition for achieving the semiotic optimum is the effectiveness of managing the goals of the subjects of education. Secondly, the effectiveness condition is the concision of the method of goal achieving. However, in the reality of life, the concision of a method is never a straight line segment connecting the “start” and “finish” points. The characteristics of information are presented in graphical and analytical form, which is not the simplest but the most concise way. A similar method – laconic graphics of conceptual schemes – is chosen to construct a semiotic optimum in lecture notes. The pursuit of this optimum determines the way the lecture itself is prepared. The lecture preparation by an educator is subordinated to the construction of the optimal balance of goals stated in the work program of the discipline, in the curriculum of a particular program, and in the potential range of students’ life aspirations. From the standpoint of the authors’ concept “pedagogical bioethics”, this range of students’ life aspirations should be accepted by the educator in a modality similar to the doctor’s acceptance of the suffering of patients. For this reason, the content of a lecture is not a moralistic sermon but an explanation of the distribution of communicative formats and communicative roles within the scope of a specific idea of morality. The construction of a semiotic optimum in the circumstances of the Unseen University meets the potential of visual semiotics: finding unseen reasons for actual visibility. The second literary example in the article is Hogwarts School since its structure contains a magical instrument – the Sorting Hat – for determining those inclinations and life aspirations of students that students are yet to know how to recognize. The role of the Hat can be played by the optimal relationship between the actual goals of all subjects of education (students and their parents; teachers and developers of training programs; managers of the educational process and potential employers). Hogwarts ghosts serve as a marker of possible errors in recognizing individual goals. With sad irony, the ghosts express possible deviations within the scope of a specific idea of morality. The chosen topic of the lecture most fully corresponds to the research problem: elucidating the potential of the syntax of the goals of the main subjects of education for constructing an optimum in fixing the content of the lecture (translation in synchrony) and the content of the student’s individual work (translation in diachrony), in particular, fixed in students’ notes. It is such notes that can become a textbook created by students for themselves, that is, in awareness of the limits of personal autonomy.

Unseen University, Hogwarts ghosts, characteristics of information, communicative formats, pedagogical bioethics