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Sun 12 May 2013

Participate or Perish?

Posted by bon under connection, digital identity, education, participation, social media
[10] Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about institutions lately. In trying to trace a narrative line through the sturm und drang around MOOCs and all that they make visible, I’ve been digging into institutional histories, trying to understand what the hell happened in the last thirty years. Who switched the terms of the game of higher education?

I’m looking at you, market forces.

For those of us raised in the world that Stanford researchers in the 70s called ‘the New Institutionalism’ – a world where education’s entire organizational structure was understood to place it firmly “beyond the grip of market forces” (Meyer & Rowan, 2006, p. 3) – it’s all gotten rather bewildering. Many managed not to notice the stealth incursion of for-profit institutions and Pearson into the world of academia (related: the student populations these corporate entities have served, via ESL textbook empires and “the MBA you can probably get into” ads, have not been the white middle-class that still codes “default university student” in North America. Ahem. Just sayin’.). But MOOCs, with their posh ties to Harvard and Stanford and their grandiose claims of revolution, sorta blew that stealth game out of the water.

MOOCs as Enclosure
This past week alone, Coursera moved into professional development for teachers and announced a partnership with Chegg, an online textbook-rental company, to connect MOOC learners with select, limited-time access to texts from large publishers. As Audrey Watters notes, these shifts are beginning to look like the enclosure of education against the very openness that MOOCs began from: “What was a promise for free-range, connected, open-ended learning online, MOOCs are becoming something else altogether. Locked-down. DRM’d. Publisher and profit friendly. Offered via a closed portal, not via the open Web.”

This enclosure is about profit models, not learning. And it profits few, in the end, because – as I got het up about in Inside Higher Ed last week – the societal mythology of education as value really only functions if institutionalized credentials in some way tie to social mobility and lucrative work.

That’s not the game we’re in, anymore.

But here’s the thing: MOOCs are a symptom of change in higher ed, not the source of it. We need to find ways of talking about this enclosure of openness by profit models, without conflating these forces with online ed in general or even entirely with MOOCs.

Because we will not resist the corporatization of education by standing solely for conventional institutionalized models. That horse has left the barn. But in online practices there may still be ways to protect and preserve some of the broad societal concept of the “we” that institutions were intended to enshrine.

MOOCs as Symptom: Networks + Neoliberalism
Basically, this is where we are: traditional institutional education is being encroached upon from all sides. And the big MOOCs conflate the two primary forces for change: networks and neoliberalism.

This is an ugly slide – I kinda like to call the clip art “retro” – but it’s the best illustration I have at the current moment for what I see actually happening to higher ed as we’ve known it. From one side, what George Siemens terms “the Internet happening to education,” or the networked opening of what was conventionally the closed domain of knowledge. From the other, the market incursion into the sphere of education, with its attendant ideological leanings towards the measurable and the profitable.

Last week, Dave & I went to two conferences together. We do the majority of our conference travel independently, so even getting to be at the same events was kind of exotic for us: being invited together was a treat. But blending our two separate strains of thought into a single keynote for the second conference was something we haven’t done in a couple of years, since all the MOOC stuff blew up.

We bickered about process: that’s par for the course, for us. We’ve worked together as long as we’ve known each other, and while our ideas and even perspectives tend to complement the other’s, our ways of getting there are pretty much opposite. (Sidenote: our writing on the MOOCbook has been pretty much two solitudes, enabling us to continue our lawyer-free relationship.)

But in the process of pulling together, between the two of us, three hour-long presentations to be delivered over the course of three days, on separate but intertwined topics, something converged and snapped into focus.

I’ve been looking at networks from an identities perspective for a few years now, trying to understand who we are when we’re online and what it is about this whole experience that actually matters, from an education perspective. Dave’s been wending his way through an exploration of rhizomatic learning as a way of navigating uncertainty within an era of knowledge abundance. Both of us have been thinking a lot about MOOCs and what they mean for change within higher ed. Hell, most of our household income comes from academic institutions, so the current budget crunch hits home.

But it became clear this week that our work needs to be about finding ways to use networks to push back against the neoliberal vision of the future of education. About making clear that the two do not share the same set of interests.

The conflation of the two is everywhere. Salon has an interview with Jaron Lanier today that makes the case that the Internet killed the middle class. Lanier’s arguments conflate networks with neoliberalism, making the latter invisible as a force unto itself. Sure, there are places where networked practices rely on neoliberal approaches to the world, in the sense of Foucault’s “entrepreneur of the self.” And neoliberalism often co-opts networked practices and naturalizes the perception that the two are one and the same.

But I don’t think they are. At least…I don’t think they inherently are.

Whether they become so is up to us. Particularly those of us who share the values espoused by public education. We need to build our learning and teaching networks, share our ideas and our questions and our practices and what works and doesn’t, and refuse to be enclosed.

Institutional concepts of educational practices enclose easily: that is their nature. The transition from institutional models of the classroom to a massive for-profit textbook magnate’s version of the classroom isn’t really much of a transition, except in what gets lost in terms of public values.

Networks don’t actually enclose easily. Hence the idea of “participate or perish” that Dave & I came up with the night before our keynote at #WILU2013 in Fredericton: a new academic imperative for our times.

Don’t just publish, because the institutional models are encroached upon and becoming enclosed. Participate. Make things different. Don’t wait for it to be your “job:” that’s institutional thinking. Institutional jobs won’t be there if we let the profit models gut education entirely.

Here are our slides from WILU2013, which trace some of these ideas through our own research lenses.

MOOCs, Rhizomes & Networks from Bonnie Stewart

And here are the slides from my Spotlight Speaker session at CONNECT2013, where I focused in more detail on the participation and networking side of things: on how to go beyond institutional identities. Help yourself.

Who are we now that We’re Online? Connected Learners, Connected Educators from Bonnie Stewart

(Postscript: the “Education is Broken” Narrative as Sniff Test)
I want to return to this one in more depth…but a quick thought. The phrase “education is broken” gets thrown around a lot in the current educational climate. It is, in a sense, one of the key reasons neoliberalism and networks get conflated: it’s the area in which they agree.

But from one perspective, the idea that education is broken is a learning claim. From the other, it’s a credentialing and business model claim.

If you’re in the process of learning to tell the difference, don’t necessarily run from anything that claims education is broken. Rather, ask what aspect of ed it frames as broken. Is it the learning? You might be looking at a network. Is it the profit model and the structure and the means of offering credential? Probably neoliberalism and enclosure at work.

You’re welcome. ;)

Tags: "education is broken", CONNECT2013, digital identities, enclosure, MOOCs, neoliberalism, networks, online education, WILU2013

Thu 11 Apr 2013

no, dude, it’s not bigotry

Posted by bon under gender
[28] Comments

We interrupt the regularly scheduled MOOCopalyse in education with this little Public Service Announcement about oppression and outrage.

WARNING: This is probably a trigger post. It’s also probably a rant, though it isn’t meant to be. It’s intended to be spoken in my nice teacher voice. Don’t mind the shaking.

Rehtaeh Parsons died on Sunday in Nova Scotia. She hanged herself. After she was raped by four of her high school classmates who shared photos which got her shunned and slutshamed but the police took ten months to even interview the accused, then concluded there was no evidence to prosecute. Anonymous took an interest today and lo and behold, the authorities are re-opening the case.

That’s the backdrop. If you haven’t heard of Rehtaeh, you should go read her dad’s words about her. Especially the ones where he points out that no, she wasn’t bullied to death…she was disappointed to death, by people she trusted. By the societal mechanisms and social contract that are supposed to protect us and seek justice on our behalf, but so often fail victims of rape and all other kinds of sexual violence and abuse of power and instead heap further shame and re-victimization on those who are vulnerable. Especially – not only, but especially – young women. Especially when “boys will be boys” kinds of attitudes are brought in to justify the kind of systemic failure that led her to believe the world wasn’t a place she could live in anymore. Especially that.

But this isn’t about Rehtaeh. It’s about the fact that to many of us – men and women – her story is all kinds of familiar. Maybe personal, maybe no. Maybe just a horror we’d like not to see happen to anyone again. But CNN’s Steubenville apologia was only last month. Amanda Todd died less than seven months ago. We’re getting the message that this isn’t going to just go away unless we DO something. But we don’t know what to do, so we talk about it.

We live in strange times. Everybody gets to have a public opinion and 700 channels to share it on and I for one welcome our new Bedlam overlords.

But there is a strain of discourse rising in the cloud that is starting to permeate a great many of the conversations I happen on. It’s the idea that women critiquing men is oppressive and equates to bigotry.

Before I get the soapbox out, let me acknowledge it’s been a bad week on Teh Internets already. We’re all het up. Everybody has opinions about Margaret Thatcher and a lot of them are ugly which may well prove the old proverb ‘you reap what you sow’ but doesn’t make for a particularly productive public conversation. Kim Jong Un is rattling his ~~soother~~ sabre again. And from the What Were They Thinking Files, the world’s least thought-through call to racial reconciliation EVER, offending most people with ears but getting noses out of joint in the comments sections of major magazines, too.

(Note, fellow educators: a generation of anti-racist education in North America seems to have succeeded in making the word ‘racist’ an offensive thing to call somebody, while utterly failing to actually educate a vast swath of the citizenry about what racism, um, IS.)

Then the Rehtaeh Parsons story hit the media.

And it’s heartbreaking. Women AND men (and everybody else who may not fit the tidy binary) are sad and mad and want to make change and want to talk about it.

But there’s something weird to me about these conversations. I have a son as well as a daughter and a deeply vested interest in having this whole cultural mess improve for everybody involved. But when I see the people who are most societally affected by issues of rape, sexual violence, and patriarchal power responses Talking Out Loud about some of these awful, hidden, stigmatized issues, in public, and expressing their anger and frustration, I see that as good. I see that as where change begins. Maybe.

But if, god forbid, their conversation gets emotional or dares to generalize fear and anger, even in a culture where 90% of rape victims are female and 99% of perpetrators male, there is frequently a descent into accusations of “reverse sexism” and bigotry.

To which I quote The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Here’s the thing about bigotry, folks.

You’re right, generalizations aren’t nice. And they do tend to make playing nicely together across differences difficult. All of us would do well to remember that. But not all conversations are about playing nice: sometimes they’re about building up enough of a chorus to cross a Rubicon and not go back, about reaching that “we’re mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it anymore” place.

I think all of us have the potential to play a productive role in conversations about equality and sexism…whatever our gender. I absolutely believe that. I want everybody in on this conversation, mad as hell.

But part of this conversation will involve being mad at patriarchy and male privilege, guys. And that doesn’t mean being mad at you personally. Unless you stand in the place of defending the whole system. Unless you insist on seeing any generalization of yourself as bigotry.

Let me explain. Generalizations – particularly about girls and sexuality – are at the root of the unequal power relations that not only allow young women to be gang raped at parties without intervention but to be revictimized after by both peers and the refusal of the authorities – the legal authorities, even the educational authorities – to dignify her violation with real consequences.

Yes, men are also raped, both by men and by women. This is true and generally the authorities don’t deal with the situation any better (sometimes worse) because that is the problem with rape: it is being made subject to the power of another and when you are on the low side of that equation systems of power like the law are simply not designed to raise you up. For women and girls, who are already on the low side of the gender power equation in our society, rape reinforces that status with a shock. For men, it must be like waking up in the wrong body.

But it is difficult to grow up in a female body and not have the generalizations that make women disproportionately vulnerable to sexual harassment and sexual objectification and sexual assault become, at some point, personal. The generalizing dismissals of “she wanted it” and “she was asking for it”: we have heard them all our lives. We ask ourselves, surely they wouldn’t say that about me? If we are lucky, we never find out. Many of us aren’t lucky. There is a lot of hurt and fear and anger and years of being subject to generalizations that are brought to these conversations about change. And when people are hurt and scared and angry they are not always the most careful about what they say. They don’t necessarily make the conversation safe or welcoming for men.

But that is not bigotry, folks.

In any societal binary – black/white, male/female, gay/straight – there’s a group with less power. Those in that group get generalized based on stereotypes all the time. These generalizations can have damaging and hurtful effects in all aspects of life, and they get institutionalized in phrases like “boys will be boys,” which essentially says, “that’s the way it is, dearie.” That’s sexism. Racism is the institutionalized power of whiteness. Heterosexism is the institutionalized power of straightness.

Bigotry is perpetuating a stereotype that reinforces the imbalance of power.

The generalizations DO work the other way, sure. Of course black people have stereotypes about white people. These stereotypes have been and continue to be a survival mechanism. Women have them about men, for the same reasons. Sometimes, in a story like Rehtaeh’s, those get triggered and people get angry and say things about “men” as a category that are not universally applicable and are hurtful to individuals. And I don’t think that’s productive. But neither is it “reverse sexism” or bigotry, because the institutional power is NOT on the side of those generalizations.

It is prejudice, yes. It can be really hurtful to be on the receiving end of it. Absolutely. I think it’s important for men to talk about that, and for women to hear it. But until women are an equal proportion of CEOs and judges and law enforcement officers and other powerful figures that men face when they seek a place in society and justice when wounded, then that prejudice is not systematized. It’s not bigotry. It is a reaction against years of being diminished.

I think to participate productively IN those conversations we have to recognize that society does not yet treat men & women equally and IF we happen to fall on the power side of that societal equation and we are nonetheless keen to talk about issues of gender and violence and trying to prevent other people suffering what Rehtaeh Parsons suffered and her family continues to suffer, we need to come into the conversation understanding that the generalizations of how our gender has abused our power – and by extension, other actual human beings – will and DO fall on our shoulders.

No matter how sincere or good we, personally, are.

No matter how difficult it is to hear people make sloppy, sweeping generalizations that don’t apply to us.

We cannot show that those generalizations don’t apply to us by expecting to be treated with the privilege that marks our group in the first place.

If I choose to engage in conversations about racism, the generalizations about white people that will inevitably come out in that conversation as people work through their experiences will fall on me. Because I’m white. They’ll fall on me if I choose to engage in conversations about heterosexism, because I’m a woman with a male partner and therefore that particular inequality works and has always worked to benefit me while others suffer.

If I want to show that I’m an ally, I have to own that the inequality exists and privileges me.

If people of colour talk about white people as racist and I want to participate in that conversation toward their goal of making it better, I need to show that I get what racism IS and reject that worldview. That doesn’t mean rejecting who I am or being ashamed or beating myself up. It means digging deeply until I understand where my whiteness gets me treated as an individual rather a representative of a stereotyped group, and then being open to learning more about how I can help make change. Without getting butthurt by generalized anger, or needing the people on the oppressed side of the equation to make me feel okay. Same with classism. Heterosexism. Ablism.

We can all be in all these conversations. But we need to get that there are structural inequalities that are bigger than our individual experiences of them, especially where we’ve benefited from those inequalities. And we need to be able to hear the ways in which those inequalities have hurt other people, even if the stories are ugly and make us uncomfortable and want reassurance that the ugliness isn’t our fault. Maybe it isn’t. But we can only show that by being willing to stand next to it and use it as a mirror for our own actions and then making change. In ourselves. Which will allow the generalizations, ultimately, to die.

Tags: bigotry, racism, rape, rehtaeh parsons, sexism

Mon 4 Mar 2013

MOOCs are Not the Enemy. Sorta.

Posted by bon under capital effects, connection, cyborgs, digital identity, edcmooc, education, etmooc, MOOCs, participation, social media
No Comments

So. I stood up in front of a whole room of academics and theorists and grad students with funky glasses this weekend and said the word “MOOC.” And nobody threw a single tomato, which surprised me.

My presentation for Theorizing the Web 13 at CUNY was entitled “MOOCs are Not the Enemy: Networked, Non-Imperialist MOOC models.” Or in simplest terms, “cMOOC is for cyborg.” Ahem.

The Cliff Notes version:
My base premises are these: privatization is bad and colonialism is bad and globalization is as shady as it’s always been and there are lots of totalizing systems at work in higher ed these days, old and new. But talking about these things through the lens of MOOCs increasingly seems to devolve into binary arguments against one totality while half-defending another, until it feels like the proverb about the seven old blind men and the elephant. A MOOC is a snake! cries the one holding the tail. No! It’s a sail! shouts the one with the ear in hand.

More Than is Dreamt of In Your Philosophy, Horatio
Both the elephant and the MOOC defy simple metaphors, because they’re huge. MOOCs make visible the intersection of a snarl of complicated axes of change and power relations in higher ed, so reifying them into a single axis – even if it’s the dominant one – leaves too much of the picture out. A MOOC is a course that is massive and open and online in some way and beyond that, for the moment, I’m agnostic.

Not because I’m not aligned: I am aligned. But because I think the conversation is too important to foreclose. There are a host of valid criticisms of MOOCs of all kinds, even the ones I really enjoy, and I want to be having those conversations and talking about the forces driving different MOOC models and driving change in higher ed. A lot of these forces scare the shit out of me, for the record. But I think – as I’ve heard other people say (I’d thought it was Cathy Davidson but I can’t seem to find a link) – that MOOCs are a symptom of these forces rather than the problem in and of themselves.

So dismissing MOOCs outright, or insisting on talking about all MOOCs as if they were one hegemonic thing rather than a still new and shifting collection of phenomena, shuts down the possibility of doing something more with them.

It gives the conversation over. I’m not ready to do that. I don’t want to give over – yet, at least – to the idea that anything about MOOCs is inevitable.

Beyond the Borg Complex
To be sure, we can’t be in higher ed today without being to some extent subject to the changes being wrought by privatization and globalization and the undermining of the narrative of public ed and the public good. These logics constrain budgets, shape policy, affect how what we do is taken up and the roles available to us.

The most dominant MOOC models embody a lot of these forces and logics. So they inspire vitriolic response: we don’t want to be the kind of subjects they seem to impose on us.

Or some of us don’t. In the ongoing Shirky/Bady back & forth about which end of the elephant is more equal than others, Bady pegs Shirky’s “it’s happening anyway, might as well adapt” response as a form of what Sacasas calls the Borg Complex, a determinist “resistance is futile” fatalism combined with a neoliberal identity approach.

But that conversation is still a binary. And leaves Bady to some extent defending the traditions of that other totalizing system, the conventional patriarchal and elitist mythology of “schooling” that many open online educational efforts exist to challenge.

I end up nodding hopelessly at the beautiful prose of the both of them and thinking about narrative escalation in pre-World War I Europe. With all this grandiose buildup, the Triple MOOC Entente and the Triple MOOC Alliance carve out increasingly opposed territories until I wonder if Archduke Ferdinand’s been shot yet and the bloody inevitability can just start, already.

Or we could explore MOOCs from a cyborg perspective.

A cyborg is not Borg
The Borg is an all-swallowing collective that cannot be resisted, a totalizing force.

Haraway‘s cyborg, on the other hand, is what might be termed a networked individual, illegitimate offspring of what Haraway calls the “informatics of domination,” but still subversive to the very forces that created her. S/he is an ironic hybrid of human and technology who breaks down binaries that otherwise seem naturalized and totalizing. The cyborg recognizes in technologies the possibility of “great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.” (1991) The cyborg is complicit, a part of this digital world. But s/he is never entirely subject to its terms: s/he is not without agency.

The cMOOC as cyborg
So on the plane down to Theorizing the Web, as I finalized my slides, I decided that the first c in cMOOC stands for cyborg.

(I mean, I know it *actually* stands for connectivist. That’s as it should be. MOOCs were founded on the connectivist principles that knowledge is distributed and generative, and I think for MOOCs to actually capitalize in any sense on the affordances of digital technologies and not merely transfer traditional approaches to learning into the online space, those two concepts are important lodestars. And the original MOOC was built not only on George Siemens‘ and Stephen Downes‘ work developing connectivism but was actually a course ON connectivism and connected knowledge: the cMOOC model is connectivism incarnate.)

Because I’ve had the (sometimes admittedly discombobulating) pleasure of working with and in and around this grassroots model of MOOC for a few years now, I have a vantage point that many of MOOCs’ detractors don’t: I have lived experience of a model of MOOC that isn’t corporate, or colonial, or – most importantly – totalizing. And I think cMOOCs and other networked online learning opportunities and efforts that attempt to destabilize some of the institutional or corporate or globalizing tendencies that dominate much of the MOOC conversation (and many MOOCs themselves) may offer a cyborg approach to massive, open, online learning: it may offer a model of subversion.

cMOOCs, even as cyborg, are neither a perfect model or a panacea for all the challenges higher education faces. But they emphasize participatory, networked, distributed approaches to learning that challenge and subvert many of our inherited cultural concepts of schooling. They encourage learners to generate knowledge, in addition to simply mastering it. They are a way to re-vision the conversation in terms that neither deny the possibilities of technology and networks nor give over entirely to the logics and informatics of domination.

They are MOOCs that undermine some of what MOOCs seems to be coming to mean, and in that, I think there is both power and potential.

***
current/ongoing/historical cMOOCs & their open/online/hybrid kin:
(including even a Coursera course that tries very hard to subvert its own conditions of production)
#etmooc (Educational Technologies MOOC – ongoing and amazing, just entering topic 4: check it & join in)
#moocmooc archives (two separate week-long MOOCs on MOOCs)
#ds106 (not a MOOC, but an ongoing, open, public course in digital storytelling via University of Mary Washington)
@dukesurprise (a for-credit Duke course with an open, public component)
#inq13 (a POOC or Participatory Open Online Course through CUNY on inequalities, with an East Harlem focus)
#edcmooc (a Coursera course in Elearning & Digital Cultures offered by University of Edinburgh that runs more like a cMOOC)
The MOOC Guide - Stephen Downes’ master resource of most cMOOC-ish offerings from the beginning
#change11 archive (the mother of all cMOOCs: 35 facilitators each took a week to explore change in higher ed)

There are lots more, I’m sure – happy to add if people want to send examples.

Tags: Borg, cyborg, higher education, MOOCs

Wed 27 Feb 2013

hybrids & subversives: the cyborg as teacher

Posted by bon under cyborgs, digital identity, edcmooc, education, MOOCs, social media, subjectivities
[2] Comments

I began teaching online in 1998, the same year I encountered Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1991) for the first time. Her cyborg – partial, ironic, always hybrid – offered a model for identity that helped me navigate that new environment. The cyborg’s emphasis on breaking down binaries enabled and encouraged me to grapple with some of the institutional and technocratic power relations that shaped our online learning context, in ways that have continued to influence my understanding of my educational practice and my research to this day.

The cyborg teacher is a hybrid, both an instrument of the schooling system and yet subversive to it: the cyborg teacher is a learner too. Teaching from the cyborg point of view helped me frame my digital classroom not as “less” or “more” than conventional learning spaces, but instead as a site for building ties of curiosity and affinity. It helped me escape the concept of the virtual and approach my online work very much as real; human and technological, both.

Now, fifteen years down the road, I see the cyborg particularly as a metaphor for networked identities. These are the kinds of selves cultivated when people integrate online social networks into their personal and professional practices not just as consumers but producers: when they blog, tweet, filter, curate, and share ideas within networks of shared interests.

In a time when our technological platforms are primarily corporate-owned and even mundane daily practices like bank card usage expose us to constant digital surveillance, the cyborg strikes me as a particularly important figure. A teacher by example, she collapses the binary distinctions our media narratives are so eager to create about social technologies.

The message of the cyborg, as I see it, is that we are complicit, part of this digital world. But we are not necessarily subject to its terms: in an age in which human agency can seem dwarfed by the innumerable invisible digital systems we interact with, the cyborg – illegitimate offspring of the very things she subverts – stands for me as a figure of hope.

Tags: cyborgs, Donna Haraway, hybrid, subversion, systems, teachers, teaching online

Sun 10 Feb 2013

Learning in the Open: Networked Student Identities

Posted by bon under cyborgs, digital identity, edcmooc, education, etmooc, participation, performativity, social media, subjectivities
[24] Comments

This weekend, I gave a short presentation at a great little student conference hosted here at UPEI: Difficult Dialogues: Exploring Relationships Between Identities and Power.

(When I say “short” I mean I was still talking when the poor timekeeper started waving the STOP sign in front of my face: it’s been awhile since I tried to encapsulate ideas into fifteen minutes.)

I made a few quick alterations to the slides after the presentation thanks to the really good questions and conversation that emerged, and in hopes of making the ideas reasonably clear on Slideshare even without an audio track. This is the first time I’ve really taken up this particular thread on the intersections between “student” and “networked learner”, so thanks to everyone at Difficult Dialogues for engaging with and supporting these ideas as I begin to work them through.

Learning in the Open:

It’s what I didn’t say that’s more interesting, though

The fact that I ran over time is apt, given how it mirrors my own current overwhelm as a learner.

The presentation troubles some of the categories of student that academia comes with, and how differing forces and logics govern the two spheres and the way learning is practiced within them. But I didn’t go far enough. While I’m a living, breathing advocate for the benefits of networked learning, it may be the problems with it that are the most instructional.

The keynote for the conference this weekend was S Bear Bergman, who gives one hell of a talk on sex, gender and trans identities. And while what I do may not intersect on the surface with Bear’s work as a thinker or a presenter, ze reminded me of something I know but have failed to transfer over to my analysis of learning and learners.

We are always signalling and reading
Engaging with each other as humans is a process of reading codes and signals.

(Okay, not entirely perhaps: I won’t wade into the “we are all texts” ontological discussion here.) But if our material and discursive signals to others aren’t readable or legible within the frameworks by which they comprehend the world, we tend to be rendered Other: either seen as transgressive or simply not seen at all.

In identity terms, visibility and speakability are necessary for legitimacy, for non-erasure. Only in the past few years have the identity signals and codes performed by queer and trans people begun to become readable and speakable on a scale that extends beyond those communities and makes those identities visible within the broader society. And slowly, slowly, mutually constituted with the very possibility of this legibility of trans people, society’s concepts of sex and gender are shifting.

Signalling networked learning
So perhaps it is with networks, though with far less advocacy, pain, marginalization and struggle, let me be very precise. But I believe learning – whether in online social networks or straight from the canon, bound in leather – involves being able to read and make sense of the codes and signals being given off by those you interact with, particularly those you expect to learn from. These are what I refer to when I talk about “legitimacy structures” within academia and networks in the final slide of the presentation above.

They are, in a sense, literacies. They’re what I’m stumbling towards when I talk about the networked or digital literacies that MOOCs – if they connect people – help develop.

I’ve been struggling to say what I research lately. Is it social media? Identities? MOOCs? Networks? My research is a process of trying to grasp and make visible a few ideas and realities from the midst of a flood. It’s about filtering and reflection and constant observation of moving targets. My sense of focus doesn’t shift so much as the ways in which it’s likely to be understood change all the time.

Part of the problem is filtering: I’ve realized recently that in my dissertation work I’ve failed, so far, to build a robust framework through which I can filter the seven hundred vaguely-related-to-the-Internet-and-learning-and-identities ideas that I encounter out here every day in my brilliant network. I meander in circles, fumbling to re-word and re-work things, trying to translate or adapt concepts I encounter and figure out whether they fit into the big picture of what we’re doing out here in this world of networked practice. Sometimes they do. Often they are rabbit holes. Seldom can I tell the difference in advance.

But what I learned at the conference on the weekend is that the filters and structure aren’t the whole challenge: how to translate and signal what I’m learning to two different audiences is also a process I’m going to have to address overtly. Because there are power structures that support and prop up societal views of knowledge that make networked knowledge and practices appear invisible or illegitimate.

For the many networked learners who are also formal students, this can be a very real problem: it can negate or frame as transgressive what is simply different. And within fields of knowledge and the academy in particular, it makes pressing contemporary conversations about online learning into polarizing and misleading soapboxes about what counts as real.

The fact that networked learners DO have signals and codes by which we connect and speak, though? Is a very important – and useful – fact. Because signals and codes – like all things that are read – can be learned.

The lack of face-to-face is not a void, only a lack of literacy
Whether networked learners are formal students within the academy as well, or no, many of us regularly come across sincere – and often deeply-thought-out objections – to the idea of online learning in general, and to its lack of the ineffable quality of authenticity in particular.

I think there are multiple axes of thought behind these objections, some of which lie in determinism or digital dualism or nostalgia or overt privileging of the physical over the virtual. But even among many participants of the MOOCs I’ve engaged in so far this winter – #MOOCMOOC, #etmooc,and #edcmooc – I see a strain of genuine hesitation to fully embrace networked learning as legitimate, or at least as AS legitimate as face-to-face learning.

And I think it’s a literacy issue. These people are, for the most part, highly traditionally literate – many are teachers and academics – and they are, to their great credit, game to give networked learning a try even if they’re not entirely sure it’s valid. But they are new to the game, and they haven’t yet put in the longterm immersion and reflection usually required to build literacies in a new environment: they can’t yet read the signals and codes by which we interact.

Because networked learning is not about technologies, or a lack of the human touch: these are simply common and understandable misconceptions given the narratives that circulate in our culture on the subject. Rather, if it’s truly about networks and not just mass broadcast, it’s about engaging with humans; about performing networked identity via the codes and signals that we digital selves share openly.

Just because that may not be visible doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. But those of us to whom it is visible…we have a job ahead to continue to assert and translate and help make our identities readable and legitimate in the field of knowledge.

Tags: academia, cyborgs, higher ed, identities, networked identities, networked learners, queer, trans

Wed 30 Jan 2013

Connected Learning: Getting Beyond Technological Determinism

Posted by bon under connection, cyborgs, edcmooc, education, etmooc, MOOCs, participation
[16] Comments

Life lately has felt like one of those dreams where you’re in a cab with your third-grade teacher on the way to a conference presentation you forgot to prepare for and then suddenly the cab morphs into a giant recycling plant and everything is spinning and…

What? You don’t have those dreams?

I have them when things get busy. It’s like a grand exercise in convergence: everything blurs together.

From the midst of the blur, though, there’s a thread I want to try to untangle from the early weeks of #etmooc (Educational Technology and Media, a collaboratively-hosted connectivist MOOC) and #edcmooc (E-learning and Digital Cultures, my first Coursera effort, offered through the University of Edinburgh). I’m taking both at once, in admittedly a bit of a peripheral way.

But the ideas are starting to bounce off each other and amplify…and then weave back together around this thread of technological determinism. Or, as I like to call it, the spectre haunting networked culture.
***

Technological Determinism 101
We live in a culture saturated with the idea that technologies are, effectively, things in themselves, in spite of the fact that they arise from and are utilized and therefore given meaning within particular social and cultural contexts. We tend to see technologies in terms of their “thingness” – their shiny gadget glory – rather than in terms of the affordances or action possibilities they enable in different societal situations. This separation of thing from context and possibility leads to determinism, or the belief that machines have the capacity to act on us and do things to us in and of themselves.

Determinism has a long and fairly star-studded history: from Socrates’ laments about what writing would do to memory through Marshall McLuhan and down to Nicholas Carr’s present-day ideas about Google making us stupid, lots of smart and famous people have forwarded rather deterministic views of the technologies of their times, during those times. Determinism tends towards answers in times of change. Could be why it’s popular?

Now, I’m not saying all determinist conclusions about technologies are wrong. What I am saying is that the way determinism gets to them creates problems. Determinism tends towards a reductionist view of what technologies are and do, assuming direct cause-effect relationships between technologies and what they make possible. Determinism also tends to attribute social phenomena that occur around given technologies to the technologies themselves, rather than what they stand for or enable or afford. Therefore, it renders the perspective on those phenomena forever skewed and tech-focused, so long as the determinist lens is still in place.

What’s wrong with that? Lots.

Technologies Don’t Connect People: Networked Relationships Connect People
The current American gun control debate is perhaps the most dramatic lens through which to illustrate the ways in which technological determinism makes for stupid arguments. On both sides of the fence.

Determinism is, in effect, a world view; one that reduces societal phenomena to “technology x did thing y.” The rest of the factors involved in the conversation get obscured or intentionally dismissed: the power of the technology to act is assumed, even when the determinist is arguing against the statement being put forward. Thus the anti-gun-control maxim “guns don’t kill people; people kill people” isn’t knee-jerk anti-determinism but actually determinism at work. It effectively controls and reduces the conversation to an assertion that guns get up by themselves and commit murder, and then smacks that down.

Now, maybe some people actually believe guns act like the brooms in Fantasia, multiplying and sweeping all by themselves. Most arguments for gun control and gun bans don’t actually operate that way, though. Those that do are determinist, and not very convincing, IMO. Guns and their availability absolutely DO lead to increased numbers of deaths, but no, generally not without people to pull the triggers.

What determinism does, though, is keep the conversation focused around a simple if specious cause-effect assertion and away from the whole host of demographic factors and identity factors and cultural factors that put people at risk from guns and support the arguments for restricted access. Determinism dismisses complexity and reinforces the idea that societal equations are simple, even when it’s pressed into service against simple equations few people are actually making. Culturally, we are trained and conditioned to accept technological determinism as common sense. So the very presence of determinism makes an important conversation hard to have, because effectively…the parties aren’t IN the same conversation, much of the time.

What does this have to do with networks and the admittedly less urgent issues around connected learning and the MOOCs I’m hanging out in? I think determinism and its prevalence as a cultural worldview are a very big part of what make the whole purpose and point of networking essentially invisible to those who aren’t immersed in it.

And I have #edcmooc and #etmooc to thank for converging to point that out to me.

Tech Utopias and Tech Dystopias are All Determinism
The very first week of #etcmooc boldly opened the conversation about digital cultures from an exploration of both Utopian and Dystopian perspectives on digital technologies within cultures, as well as a great foundational reading arguing against determinism. Part of me is tickled by this, because it’s making for great imagination fodder in the tweets and discussion, but I also note that the flights of (really artistically compelling) determinism represented by the best Dystopias and Utopias tend to reinforce the same worldview . Like the “guns don’t kill people” mantra, Dystopian and Utopian narratives frame thinking about technologies in their own binary good/bad terms. So it’ll be interesting to see if and how the class actually breaks down those binaries as we carry on, or if we get stuck there, endlessly debating whether digital culture is Utopic or Dystopic.

For my part, I think digital culture – and particularly networked culture – is neither. It has elements of good and bad, but good or bad is, from my non-determinist’s lens, the wrong question to even be asking.

But I do think determinism gets in the way of many of the conversations I try to have about networked culture, as a teacher and a scholar and a blogger whose work is largely about framing this complex set of practices within various non-networked contexts.

How the Add-On Perspective Misses the Point
I saw this again last night, when I tuned into George Couros‘ #etmooc discussion of connected leadership. George is an actively networked Division Principal who shares his learning and his educational practice, and who advocates for encouraging this type of connection across educational communities and between stakeholders.

In the backchannel chat on Collaborate, there was a lot of anecdotal discussion of the differences connection – ie building networked professional profiles via social media – has made for many of us, as well as a particularly skeptical response from one participant who kept saying things along the lines of, “but we didn’t have social networking sites when I was a kid, and I turned out fine.”

In my life outside of MOOCs, I meet a lot of people with these kinds of positions on social media. Many of them are my loved ones, my good friends, my colleagues and teachers. Many of them have also never really tried the things they dismiss so easily, so kudos to the dude in the #etmooc chat for being willing to engage in the networked environment of the MOOC long enough to make the point, at least.

But it is a point that tends to miss the point. It’s a point that assumes social networks are an add-on, an extra…essentially a tech toy or a diversion from the “real” work or “real” sociality that makes the world go round. This is digital dualism, but it’s also determinism at work. It hears all this enthusiasm about connection as about the social networking platforms themselves – “yay blog!’ or “yay Twitter!” – and not about the connections and actions and forms of identity that those networked environments make possible.

Determinism reduces conversation about social networks to a conversation about platforms and tech, not about people and the ways in which they intersect with those platforms and tech to create new possibilities. It effectively mutes those latter parts of the conversation; refuses them admittance. It insists that a conversation about technologies’ effects is a conversation about the technologies themselves.

Twitter is not a Ferrari
Subtle distinction, maybe. And one that we’ve been acculturated to miss: enthusiasm related to technologies WAS mostly about the tech platform itself, back in the mechanical and even early digital ages. If I’m excited about driving a Ferrari, for instance, it’s likely not the fact that I’m off to see Grandma or wide open spaces that is actually the focus of my excitement, but rather the Ferrari itself.

Now, Twitter is no Ferrari, but early – and pervasive – geek culture stereotypes tend to perpetuate this narrative of the hard-on for the thing in itself rather than what it affords. And those of us who don’t self-identify as geeks – I’m one, for all my immersion in the digitally networked sphere – are trained to recognize this narrative as Other and thus reject it.

Thus to those who’ve never really used a social network other than FB, where you’re pretty much talking to people you know, the chatter about how marvellous being a connected educator or scholar or simply human can be probably sounds a lot like “yay Twitter!” They look at us, and think, “man, those people get TOO excited about 140-character-limits on expression” and we all go about our merry business still completely misunderstanding each other.

Does Connection Minimize Technological Determinism?
The narratives we have around technologies and society and their intersections aren’t hugely visible to most of us. And they tend to shift with use: I have yet to see anyone deeply embedded within networked culture – whether as an educator or a momblogger or a poet – who has a determinist view of technologies. This isn’t a matter of chicken-egg…over nearly seven years, I’ve watched even people who started out quite convinced that their online lives were an add-on utterly separate from their real lives and that blog platforms were fun in and of themselves move to deeply embedded networked identities.

But many don’t start. And I’m thinking maybe being able to recognize technological determinism and address it directly might give those of us who find value in networked connections and connected learning an important tool for building better conversations about this, and therefore better connections.

Tags: connected learning, Dystopia, edcmooc, etmooc, gun control, technological determinism, Utopia

Wed 23 Jan 2013

A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age

Posted by bon under education, MOOCs
[12] Comments

I’m one of the people who collaborated on and signed the document below.

It grew out of a small gathering in California last month, where there was much raucous debate about online learning and the future of higher ed. Our conversation initially centered around MOOCs, but shifted, as MOOC conversations tend to. See the story in The Chronicle.

One of the ideas it shifted to was that of a Bill of Rights for Learners in the myriad online/hybrid courses and enterprises that MOOCs seem to be spawning. Not every institution of higher ed will be jumping into partnership with Coursera or Udacity, but many are having to rethink online learning- the IHE today says 47% of provosts think MOOCs threaten the business model of their institutions – and in this flurry to get in the game, the pedagogy/peeragogy aspects of online learning aren’t always front and centre. Nor is the nearly two decades of solid educational research in this area (I’m waving at you, Open University!) always well-known.

The key point of the Bill is that as online learning suddenly seems to be hitting the mainstream of administrative and faculty conversations, against the backdrop of MOOCs and fiscal pressures, it’s important that changes be made with learners at their centre.

I was – and still am, to be honest – a bit uncomfortable with the Bill of Rights language, and haven’t fully unpacked that. It may just be my Canadian ears. It may be that I’d rather stay away from Enlightenment language like “rights” for other people, even if I *am* a student and a learner both. Matters not, now: it’s named…at least for the moment. And open for edits and input and hacks, in hopes that it becomes something more than it is.

In the next year, many of us in higher ed will find ourselves designing some form of MOOC or hybrid or online course. For me, that’s exciting. I’ve taught online since 1998. MOOCs are an opportunity for me to actually focus my teaching and research expertise into the same piece of course design. But for most in higher ed that’s not the case. So perhaps this Bill will start some conversations and provide/provoke some ideas for those pressed into service on this “new” frontier. It will not solve the majority of the issues MOOCs raise. But it may help re-focus the conversation on learners and learning, which matters.

And it may – I hope – foreground the importance of learners as teachers and peer teachers, beginning to shift the power relations that schooling has tended to reinforce.

Preamble

Work on this Bill of Rights & Principles began in Palo Alto, California, on December 14, 2012. We convened a group of people passionate about learning, about serving today’s students, and about using every tool we could imagine to respond better to the needs of students in a global, interactive, digitally connected world.

The Internet has made it possible for anyone on the planet to be a student, a teacher, and a creative collaborator at virtually no cost. Novel technologies that can catalyze learning are bubbling up in less time than it takes to read this sentence. Some have emerged from universities, some from the private sector, some from individuals and digital communities. In the past year, Massive Online Open Courseware, or MOOCs, have become the darling of the moment–lauded by the media, embraced by millions–so new, so promising in possibility, and yet so ripe for exploitation.

We believe that online learning represents a powerful and potentially awe-inspiring opportunity to make new forms of learning available to all students worldwide, whether young or old, learning for credit, self-improvement, employment, or just pleasure. We believe that online courses can create “meaningful” as well as “massive” learning opportunities.

We are aware of how much we don’t know: that we have yet to explore the full pedagogical potential of learning online, of how it can change the ways we teach, the ways we learn, and the ways we connect.

And we worry that this moment is fragile, that history frequently and painfully repeats itself. Think of television in the 1950s or even correspondence courses in the 1920s. As we begin to experiment with how novel technologies might change learning and teaching, powerful forces threaten to neuter or constrain technology, propping up outdated educational practices rather than unfolding transformative ones.

All too often, during such wrenching transitions, the voice of the learner gets muffled.

For that reason, we feel compelled to articulate the opportunities for students in this brave electronic world, to assert their needs and–we dare say–rights.

We also recognize some broader hopes and aspirations for the best online learning. We include those principles as an integral addendum to the Bill of Rights below.

Our broad goal is to inspire an open, learner-centered dialogue around the rights, responsibilities, and possibilities for education in the globally-connected world of the present and beyond.

I. Bill of Rights

We believe that our culture is increasingly one in which learning, unlearning and relearning are as fundamental to our survival and prosperity as breathing. To that end, we believe that all students have inalienable rights which transfer to new and emerging digital environments. They include:

The right to access
Everyone should have the right to learn: traditional students, non-traditional students, adults, children, and teachers, independent of age, gender, race, social status, sexual orientation, economic status, national origin, bodily ability, and environment anywhere and everywhere in the world. To ensure the right to access, learning should be affordable and available, offered in myriad formats, to students located in a specific place and students working remotely, adapting itself to people’s different lifestyles, mobility needs, and schedules. Online learning has the potential to ensure that this right is a reality for a greater percentage of the world’s population than has ever been realizable before.

The right to privacy
Student privacy is an inalienable right regardless of whether learning takes place in a brick-and-mortar institution or online. Students have a right to know how data collected about their participation in the online system will be used by the organization and made available to others. The provider should offer clear explanations of the privacy implications of students’ choices.

The right to create public knowledge
Learners within a global, digital commons have the right to work, network, and contribute to knowledge in public; to share their ideas and their learning in visible and connected ways if they so choose. Courses should encourage open participation and meaningful engagement with real audiences where possible, including peers and the broader public.

The right to own one’s personal data and intellectual property
Students also have the right to create and own intellectual property and data associated with their participation in online courses. Online programs should encourage openness and sharing, while working to educate students about the various ways they can protect and license their data and creative work. Any changes in terms of service should be clearly communicated by the provider, and they should never erode the original terms of privacy or the intellectual property rights to which the student agreed.

The right to financial transparency
Students have a right to know how their participation supports the financial health of the online system in which they are participating. They have a right to fairness, honesty, and transparent financial accounting. This is also true of courses that are “free.” The provider should offer clear explanations of the financial implications of students’ choices.

The right to pedagogical transparency
Students have the right to understand the intended outcomes–educational, vocational, even philosophical–of an online program or initiative. If a credential or badge or certification is promised by the provider, its authenticity, meaning, and intended or historical recognition by others (such as employers or academic institutions) should be clearly established and explained.

The right to quality and care
Students have the right to care, diligence, commitment, honesty and innovation. They are not being sold a product–nor are they the product being sold. They are not just consumers. Education is also about trust. Learning–not corporate profit–is the principal purpose of all education.

The right to have great teachers
All students need thoughtful teachers, facilitators, mentors and partners in learning, and learning environments that are attentive to their specific learning goals and needs. While some of us favor peer learning communities, all of us recognize that, in formal educational settings, students should expect–indeed demand–that the people arranging, mentoring and facilitating their learning online be financially, intellectually and pedagogically valued and supported by institutions of higher learning and by society. Teachers’ know-how and working conditions are students’ learning conditions.

The right to be teachers
In an online environment, teachers no longer need to be sole authority figures but instead should share responsibility with learners at almost every turn. Students can participate and shape one another’s learning through peer interaction, new content, enhancement of learning materials and by forming virtual and real-world networks. Students have the right to engaged participation in the construction of their own learning. Students are makers, doers, thinkers, contributors, not just passive recipients of someone else’s lecture notes or methods. They are critical contributors to their disciplines, fields, and to the larger enterprise of education.

II. Principles

The following are principles to which the best online learning should aspire. We believe the merit of specific courses, programs, or initiatives can be judged on the strength of their adherence to these principles and encourage students and professors to seek out and create digital learning environments that follow and embody them.

Global contribution
Online learning should originate from everywhere on the globe, not just from the U.S. and other technologically advantaged countries. The best courses will be global in design and contribution, offering multiple and multinational perspectives. They should maximize opportunities for students from different countries to collaborate with one another, to contribute local knowledge and histories and to learn one another’s methods, assumptions, values, knowledge and points of view.

Value
The function of learning is to allow students to equip themselves to address the challenges and requirements of life and work. Online learning can serve as a vehicle for skills development, retraining, marketable expertise. It can also support self-improvement, community engagement, intellectual challenge, or play. All of these functions are valid. The best programs and initiatives should clearly state the potential contexts in which they offer value.

Flexibility
Students should have many options for online learning, not simply a digitized replication of the majors, minors, requirements, courses, schedules and institutional arrangements of conventional universities. The best online learning programs will not simply mirror existing forms of university teaching but offer students a range of flexible learning opportunities that take advantage of new digital tools and pedagogies to widen these traditional horizons, thereby better addressing 21st-century learner interests, styles and lifelong learning needs. Ideally, they will also suggest and support new forms of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary inquiry that are independent of old gatekeepers such as academic institutions or disciplines, certification agencies, time-to-degree measurements, etc.

Hybrid learning
Freed from time and place, online learning should nonetheless be connected back to multiple locations around the world and not tethered exclusively to the digital realm. This can happen by building in apprenticeships, internships and real-world applications of online problem sets. Problem sets might be rooted in real-world dilemmas or comparative historical and cultural perspectives. (Examples might include: “Organizing Disaster Response and Relief for Hurricane Sandy” or “Women’s Rights, Rape, and Culture” or “Designing and Implementing Gun Control: A Global Perspective.”)

Persistence
Learning is emergent, a lifelong pursuit, not relegated to the brick walls of an institution or to a narrow window of time during life; it has no specific end point. The artificial divisions of work, play and education cease to be relevant in the 21st century. Learning begins on a playground and continues perpetually in other playgrounds, individual and shared workspaces, communities and more. Learning can be assessed but doesn’t aim itself exclusively toward assessment.

Innovation
Both technical and pedagogical innovation should be hallmarks of the best learning environments. A wide variety of pedagogical approaches, learning tools, methods and practices should support students’ diverse learning modes. Online learning should be flexible, dynamic, and individualized rather than canned or standardized. One size or approach does not fit all.

Formative assessment
Students should have the opportunity to revise and relearn until they achieve the level of mastery they desire in a subject or a skill. Online learning programs or initiatives should strive to transform assessment into a rich, learner-oriented feedback system where students are constantly receiving information aimed at guiding their learning paths. In pedagogical terms, this means emphasizing individualized and timely (formative) rather than end-of-learning (summative) assessment. Similarly, instructors should use such feedback to improve their teaching practices. Assessment is only useful insofar as it helps to foster a culture of success and enjoyment in learning.

Experimentation
Experimentation should be an acknowledged affordance and benefit of online learning. Students should be able to try a course and drop it without incurring derogatory labels such as failure (for either the student or the institution offering the course). Through open discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of programs, the industry should develop crowd-sourced evaluative guides to help learners choose the online learning that best fits their needs.

Civility
Courses should encourage interaction and collaboration between students wherever it enhances the learning experience. Such programs should encourage student contributions of content, perspectives, methods, reflecting their own cultural and individual perspectives. Online learning programs or initiatives have a responsibility to share those contributions in an atmosphere of integrity and respect. Students have the right and responsibility to promote and participate in generous, kind, constructive communication within their learning environment.

Play
Open online education should inspire the unexpected, experimentation, and questioning–in other words, encourage play. Play allows us to make new things familiar, to perfect new skills, to experiment with moves and crucially to embrace change–a key disposition for succeeding in the 21st century. We must cultivate the imagination and the dispositions of questing, tinkering and connecting. We must remember that the best learning, above all, imparts the gift of curiosity, the wonder of accomplishment, and the passion to know and learn even more.

* * *

DATE: January 23, 2013

SIGNATURES:

John Seely Brown, University of Southern California and Deloitte Center for the Edge
Betsy Corcoran, Co-founder, CEO, EdSurge
Cathy N. Davidson, Distinguished Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies, Co-Director PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge, Duke University, and cofounder Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (hastac.org)
Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, Stanford University
Todd Edebohls, CEO of careers and education service Inside Jobs (insidejobs.com)
Mark J. Gierl, Professor of Educational Psychology, Canada Research Chair in Educational Measurement, and Director, Centre for Research in Applied Measurement and Evaluation, University of Alberta, Canada
Sean Michael Morris, Educational Outreach for Hybrid Pedagogy (hybridpedagogy.com) and Part-time Faculty in the English and Digital Humanities Program at Marylhurst University in Portland, OR
(Jan) Philipp Schmidt, Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) and MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow
Bonnie Stewart, Ph.D candidate and Sessional Lecturer, Faculty of Education, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada
Jesse Stommel, Director of Hybrid Pedagogy (hybridpedagogy.com) and Director of English and Digital Humanities at Marylhurst University in Portland, OR
Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity, Google Fellow and Research Professor in Computer Science, Stanford University
Audrey Watters, Writer, Hack Education

* * *

Invitation:
To join the discussion, visit one of the many platforms where this Bill of Rights and Principles is being published and blogged about (each of us, and each of the platforms, will likely create a different sort of engagement). We invite further discussion, hacking, and forking of this document. Use #learnersrights when you share your versions and responses. Finally, and most importantly, this document can’t be complete (can never be complete) without continuous and dynamic contributions and revising by students. We invite students everywhere to read this beginning, to talk about it, to add to it.

Additional resources: We have not included reading resources here but invite you to add the ones most meaningful to you in the public, crowd-sourced version of the Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age. That collective contribution is the principle we espouse in this document. We look forward to your participation.

Tags: Bill of Rights, learners, MOOCs

Wed 9 Jan 2013

Education for a Digital Age?

Posted by bon under education, moocmooc, MOOCs, participation
[16] Comments

Do MOOCs inherently help develop digital literacies?

I’ve been thinking about this…and I think they can – even in xMOOC format – IF they are built on platforms that enable peer-to-peer networking.

I sat down to do an experiment for this week’s #moocmooc – a kind of short video essay exploring some of my thoughts on MOOCs and their capacity for developing digital literacies in the form of decentering (gasp!) teachers – and 28 hours later, after life and meetings and childrearing and my own occasionally stunning levels of technical idiocy interfered and I decided to conflate Tuesday’s video assignment with Wednesday’s peer pedagogies assignment, kinda, I emerged with a $*&($#&%$*)! video essay that is nearly 28 hours long.

Okay, 11+ minutes.

Apparently I *don’t* think better out loud. I *do* think better in the round, though, so I’m going to try another experiment right here, and rather than expanding in my usual prosaic format about my ideas, I’m gonna try to condense them. And then open them up for critique and improvement.

You can follow along while watching the video (alas, this version doesn’t feature my cat Clementine, as two cutting-room floor drafts did, but does feature sound, which another sleek 9 minute run-through did not. Please to enjoy the fruits of my, uh, compromise. Ignore the fact that my head bobs around a whole lot. This was Take #23 or something.)

Key Ideas & Assumptions:
1. The early MOOCs DID develop digital literacies, inherently.
I always thought of MOOCs as helping to develop digital literacies because my first MOOCs were all connectivist, and focused on the generative knowledge of networks, and the principles of aggregation, remix, repurpose and feed-forward: in them, learners worked to expand on and connect with the ideas of others by creating and sharing ideas of our own.

2. Then xMOOCs came along.
The big xMOOC startups seem to have been taken up as if the transformational thing about them is that they’re massive But really, massively-scaled education was tried back in the 20th century with TV broadcast models and never really lived up to the hype (side-note: a lot of educational TV initiatives evolved into what became known as “distance learning,” which I worked in back in 1998 when it was morphing to online ed). Broadcast education at scale has never been particularly effective. Or revolutionary. And the capacity to educate at scale is not inherently digital.

3. Ergo, if MOOCs are simply massive (& open in the sense of registration), that is NOT scaling education for the digital age.
That is, in fact, what Cathy Davidson calls scaling what’s broken in education. Taking a transmission model of teaching and broadcasting it via the internet does not create digital literacies, or citizens of the Internet.

4. But if MOOCs are built on platforms that enable (and preferably coax or encourage) the digital affordance of networked participation, connecting peer to peer, they *will* teach at least one key digital literacy. Especially if they’re big.
Traditional models of education have the teacher at the centre, providing knowledge, structure, care and validation (hopefully), among other things. Learning and value can come from this, but the model has become hegemonic and leads people to approach learning situations as if they are vessels to be filled, rather than active, central participants in their own learning. But at scale, with 20,000 students, teachers can’t humanly fulfill the validation needs, in particular, of learners to know whether they’re learning and making sense. The more students, the harder that is. So what networked MOOCs at scale do is decenter teachers. Not devalue. Just decenter.

5. Unlike broadcast models of scale, networked platforms need not leave learners hanging for validation, though. Peers can and will step into collaborative validation and knowledge-building roles if they have the means to connect and share.
At first, being in any course where you’re not performing directly – and predominantly – for the teacher is disorienting. Gradually, however, so long as the facilitator still provides structure and serves to lead continued movement and step in where thorny spots or challenges become evident, this freedom to lead and explore within peer networks can be pretty heady. The extent to which a facilitator encourages this depends on the content and assessment structure of the course; if it’s a mastery-based course with testing at the end, peer-generated knowledge may not be a goal. But peer networks of shared idea validation, like free-form networked study groups, have a place in almost any learning model. Even xMOOCs.

6. So if the network capacity is present, even conventional delivery of content – whether xMOOC or cMOOC or anywhere on the spectrum in between - can implicitly help learners to learn to look to networks rather than lone teachers or facilitators.
And this IS a key digital orientation towards the world and the practice of learning.

So maybe, with millions of registrants around the world, MOOCs *can* be a key part of education for the digital age, by help learners unlearn the passive “schooling” model of transmission education that many still seem to struggle to shed. But ONLY if they utilize networked platforms that enable and encourage communications and connections between learners.

That’s my two cents. There’s something hopeful here, I think.

What do you think #MOOCMOOC? This is – even at Take #23 – just a draft of a thesis. Have at it. :)

Tags: digital literacies, MOOCMOOC, MOOCs, peer pedagogies

Fri 4 Jan 2013

the MOOC is dead, long live the MOOC

Posted by bon under education, great debates, MOOCs, participation
[29] Comments

It’s a brand new year, people. Four days in, and my brain is still rife with metaphors of new-fallen snow and fresh starts and resolute setting of goals.

But for all the rhetorical power of these conceptual flights of potentiality, I am stuck with the distinct feeling that the old year bloody well followed me home and sits lolling about on my desk, laughing at my attempts to clean slate and begin anew.

“Wherever you go, there you are,” an old friend used to say.

Where I am is still last year’s business. In fact, if 2012 really *was* the Year of the MOOC, I’ll be cozied up with last year for the next three months straight.

The night before New Year’s Eve, I joked on Twitter about Dave & I buckling down to work on the MOOCbook before the zeitgeist of the old year passed.

This morning I opened up my poor neglected blog and discovered the draft of this post, begun in July and last touched in late October, titled, in fact, “the MOOC is dead, long live the MOOC.” Apparently the joke is on me.

That’s the thing about MOOCs. They’re so everywhere that I can’t even keep track of what *I’ve* thought about them in the past couple of months, let alone the other copious buckets of ink spilled on the topic.

The whole damn thing has gotten so vast. And I feel as though it’s anathema to the current professional climate to ever admit one is overwhelmed, especially early in the new year, when one is supposed to be washed clean of all that baggage.

But there it is. Wherever you go, there you are.
***

Looking around at the broad higher ed/edtech scene, I suspect talking about MOOCs in productive ways is getting harder for everyone.

When there’s a clamour of voices, identifying the places and positions people are speaking from, let alone what’s left to be said, can be an assault from all directions. Trying to research MOOCs and write speculatively about what they may imply for higher ed is a lot like working in the midst of a big ol’ maelstrom. Mostly composed of verbiage.

Traditional models don’t suffice. Good research tends to try to be clear about which shoulders of giants it stands upon, and which gap in knowledge it aims to address. MOOCs are still such a moving target that the gaps in knowledge and direction aren’t really yet clear. And news reporting thrives on a heady mix of sensationalism and actual change, both of which are beginning to wear thin.

Because the biggest obstacle to effective conversation about MOOCs is that none of us IN the conversation – even the biggest names – appear to be clear yet on what MOOCs are or can be, or on where they begin and end.

As Dave put it in his inaugural appearance in ye olde fancy Wall Street Journal, “Nobody has any idea how it’s going to work.”

I’d go a step further, beyond the business model aspect of the conversation. I think the challenge with MOOCs, at this juncture, is that nobody has any idea what they are. This makes talking about what they *can be,* let alone their effects on what *is* in contemporary higher ed, rather a challenge.

Roger Whitson nailed it back in August after the first #MOOCMOOC experiment, with his Derridean claim of “il n’y a pas de hors-MOOC” or There is no-outside MOOC; there is nothing outside the MOOC.

We *know* what we mean when we talk about higher education, or at least, we believe we do. We have a broadly agreed-upon societal understanding of where the perimeters of that conversation lie. In fact, the perimeters of that conversation have traditionally lain more or less where MOOCs begin.

But where do MOOCs end? If we are talking about experimentation with learning online, on any kind of mass scale, are we then talking about MOOCs? How do we distinguish one possibility from another?

A year ago, MOOCs themselves were a rather small experimental niche; a loose but vibrant network of learning focused around principles of connectivism and openness and distributed, generative knowledge. Then Sebastian Thrun opened up the AI course at Stanford: to those for whom MOOCs were familiar, the term fit.

George Siemens called the AI course a MOOC back in August, 2011. The media gradually caught up, because there was no other equivalent term. When Thrun founded Udacity and the hype began to build, the word “MOOC” followed. And the rest, as they say, is history. Rather accidental history.

One of the most fascinating things about the proliferation of MOOC buzz is the way in which it’s made visible the networks by which media and higher ed make knowledge today.

But here we are, wherever we go. MOOCs mean video lectures. Or they mean distributed, aggregated means of making new knowledge. Or they mean democratization, or disruption, or whatever other Christ-on-the-cross people want to hang their futures on.

So how do we talk about the Internet happening to education without getting hopelessly mired in Wittgensteinian language-games? How do we begin to sort out and advocate for what we want MOOCs to be, when conversations about them tend to immediately point out that participants are speaking from entirely different reference points and hopes and belief systems?

I wish I knew. That’d be a heady way to start the new year. Instead, all I know is too much is being conflated under this bubble, as if everybody just woke up and noticed the internet might actually be relevant to higher ed. In that sense, I almost hope the 2012 narrative around MOOCs *is* good and dead, much as I doubt the calendar shift simply erased it.

But I also know that this messy, paralytic conversation remains one of the liveliest things I’ve ever participated in professionally, in almost twenty years in the field of education. The idealist in me says that if we don’t know where MOOCs end, then maybe their possibilities are still grandly open.

For me personally, the value of MOOCs has been primarily in belonging: in finding ways to connect and learn and share within otherwise too-broad networks. In that spirit, then, I’ve signed up for two new (connectivist-style) MOOCs this month – #etmooc and the second #MOOCMOOC – in the midst of the book-writing and thesis-researching on the subject. I’m hoping the more active engagement will help rejuvenate my own sense of the meta-conversation, and where to speak from.

Tags: etmooc, MOOCMOOC, MOOCs

Tue 20 Nov 2012

Twitter for Teachers: an experiment in openness

Posted by bon under digital identity, education, participation, social media
[18] Comments

So. Nine weeks of teaching Educational Technologies with a Bachelor of Education class. Out in the open. Quite an experience.

At the intersection of the Internet and education, ‘open’ seems to be the word on which directions hang. Openness is everywhere: in code, in the shift from scarcity to abundance, in OERs and MOOCs and all those Big Things that are going to change Everything. Um, somehow.

The issue is that ‘open’ is open to interpretation. As a signifier in the world of education and technologies, it’s a word that means different things to different people.

Most of those things – open education, open access, open content among them – have their own histories and interests. They intersect around sharing and re-use of resources, to an extent, but are not interchangeable.

Each of them has important contributions to make to education, particularly in relation to the rise of the venture capital xMOOCs and Khan Academy models, wherein ‘open’ increasingly looks like it’s being taken up as a precursor to the words ‘for business.’

But all these forms of ‘open’ tend to be tied in some way to the paths via which the Internet bypasses closed and traditionally-monetized systems.

There’s another form of ‘open’ that the internet makes possible.

Why Openness?
I think it may be the most important one, in terms of education’s potential. But it’s tied to a concept of value that doesn’t necessarily monetize well.

It’s ‘open’ in the personal sense, where the boundaries of privacy and professionalism blur. It’s still about sharing and re-use, but from an individual node-in-network perspective. Here is my stuff, it says. My learning, best as I can sum it up or package it right now. My efforts. Here is my work, my passion, my humour, my stumbling in the dark. Here are my people, my conversations, my ideas in raw form. Maybe you can do something with it. With any of it. Go.

It’s the kind of ‘open’ at the centre of Alan Levine’s longstanding True Stories of Openness project (recently re-branded from Amazing Stories of Openness thanks to closed copyright issues), which captures powerful stories of individual experiences of transformation and opportunity and travel (and more!) all stemming from sharing and re-use at the personal level.

It the kind of ‘open’ that takes traditionally-closed subject roles like ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ and forces everyone to navigate new ways of interacting, based less on the safety net of hierarchy and formality and more on plain old engagement with ideas.

Why Twitter?
I’ve been writing and working professionally in the open, in this sense, for years, blogging and sharing and Tweeting and somewhere along the way, building up an incredible network of people whom I talk to about education and writing and technologies and parenting and learning and…welll…just life. I’ve gotten great value from it all, and while much of it started for me with my blog, it’s been Twitter that’s really opened up and enriched my circles these past few years.

So this past term, when I had the chance to build Twitter into the Technologies in Education course my friend & colleague Daniel Lynds & I were developing and teaching, I leapt. I’ve introduced classes to Twitter before, and even had them utilize it for particular assignments, but I’ve never made it a central (and required) thinking and sharing space over the length of a term. And I’ve NEVER shared a class hashtag with two other sections (I taught one section of #ed474; Daniel taught two) of the same course, effectively making the Twitter space an open, cross-class forum for seventy-ish people, a good three-quarters of whom went in quite unenthused about the whole Twitter prospect.

It turns out it’s fun. And one of the hardest things I’ve ever done as a teacher.

Here’s some of what I (and we) learned in the process.

The Plan: Participatory Education
The course was titled “Technologies in Education.” When Daniel & I were hired, we were asked to keep the syllabi fairly parallel, so we designed the course structure together, building in part from old course descriptions and timelines but creating an entirely new reading list, with new assignments.

One of these? Twitter. At least four tweets a week, for nine weeks. At least half these had to be conversational, directed at other classmates or authors of articles or us as instructors, or anybody else brave enough to take up the shared and public #ed474 hashtag. At least one tweet a week was supposed to share a link, with synopsis, related to our readings and the reflective assignments going on behind the scenes, in the Moodle LMS spaces assigned to each class.

The main goal of the great #ed474 Twitter experiment was basically to try to scaffold students into meaningful engagements with the real affordances of the Internet: openness, sharing, collaboration, networking beyond geographic limitations.

Yeh. Nothing ambitious. ;)

We wanted to model participation: Twitter tends not to make sense to anybody in the first few weeks they try it. It’s a participatory medium – sustained engagement is key.

We also wanted to model networking. There were twelve required readings in the course, plus a number of suggested videos and other resources. The majority of these were by people working actively and openly in the field of Technologies in Education. People on Twitter, people who students could engage with – maybe – if they tried. People whom students could make part of their own long-term, sustainable professional development networks. People whom students could, in effect, leave our classrooms and take with them. People like Will Richardson, who took half an hour to Skype with my class and talk about an article many of them had found inflammatory on first contact. That half hour – and that sense of connection, which both they and he continued on Twitter – may have been the factor that opened the door to what ‘open’ can be, for many of them.

In education, we talk a lot about student-centered learning and collaboration and real-life engagement. These are important, we tell pre-service teachers. But we don’t always do a great job of modelling them. We figured if we could make this experiment work, even a little, students would come out not only with skills in utilizing social media for professional and educational purposes, they *might* also come out with a far more 21st century sense of what it means to be an educator.

Mutiny in The Open?
Even aiming in this direction – for Daniel and I – meant changing our senses of our role and its entitlements, as well.

Academia tends to be one of those (literally) old-school closed structures. Education is about and has always been about systems of power. It’s also about learning and transformation and all those things, but the traditional classroom system privileges the teacher as authority. We’re trained from childhood to pay attention when the teacher raises her voice or flicks the lights. There’s no equivalent process in social media. When you open things up and get three classes of students actively sharing a hashtag, you change the power differential. Not entirely, but more than is comfortable, sometimes.

A few weeks into the course things got tense. Daniel & I hadn’t fully managed to get students onside, I don’t think, with the structure and intent of the course overall, and there was anxiety across all sections about an upcoming in-class assignment. The individual circumstances governing our classes differed, and Daniel ended up postponing that assignment for his two sections.

Ten minutes later, the first Tweet came across my screen: “can we get an extension too?”

One student asking quickly became three. In the open, indeed.

Our class didn’t actually have the same reasons for postponement: this was a participatory assignment and my instincts were that to build energy and buy-in, I needed to engage them, not postpone. But I also needed to address the request Right That Minute, in a public way, in a series of 140 character tweets that let them know I heard and respected their concerns.

Because if I’d walked away, by the time I came back, the requests would have built to a clamour. And by the time there’s a clamour, people have dug in.

I gulped. Then I put on my Very Best Self and listened and and tried to hear what was actually being asked for. It sounded like fairness was being asked for – they needed to know there were real reasons not to postpone our group given that the other group had been. Fair enough.

That’s the thing about working in the open. You can’t simply dim the lights and hush everyone. You’re part of something, and you may be guiding something, but you don’t control that thing. You’re in it with the network you’ve built. If that network includes your students, then they have public voices within it. If they mutiny, the mutiny will be active and loud and confusing unless you understand what’s going on. They’re not being insubordinate (usually). Networks are not hierarchies. And the medium encourages overt performance of discontent or questioning in a way that the classroom simply doesn’t, unless you’re in Dead Poets’ Society.

And however you all succeed or fail or muddle through, everybody’s watching. No pressure.

In truth, though, as someone who is both a teacher AND a student and has worn both hats simultaneously for years, this openness is a Good Thing. It begins to unpack the power structures around teaching. But your role won’t be the thing that backs your authority. It’s only you, and your fairness and accountability and willingness to both listen and lead.

The End Game
The jury’s still out on whether the course worked, particularly in its Twitter incarnation.

I think, for some, it did. Others went along but aren’t likely to leave enthusiasts of the platform. Daniel has a theory that there are Stages of Twitter, like Stages of Grief. People start with Reluctance (or Derision, even), and might stay there forever unless some form of necessity (like, say, a course) forced them into the environment. Once there, they flounder through Confusion, Awareness, Acceptance, and…if all goes smashingly well, into Engagement (even Enthusiasm!)

I think a few of our students made it to Enthusiasm. One – bless her – said, via a series of Tweets: “In our program so much of the theory speaks to collaboration but it wasn’t until #ed474 that I was was able to put this theory to practice through tweeting and moodle posts. Learned a lot & enjoyed #ed474 - look forward to keeping up these connections for my continuing professional development.”

A couple, out of the nearly seventy, stayed firmly if respectfully in Reluctance. Most made it to at least Awareness, if only because Confusion simply tends to fade after a few weeks of sustained usage, whether you like what you’re doing or no. A good number, I think, will keep their accounts.

(Those who do will notice I unfollowed them. NOT because I don’t want to be in their networks…I do. But forcing people on Twitter and then hoping they’ll stay but making them feel stuck with me feels…Big Brotherish. So I’m giving them the out. If they want me in their professional networks, they just need to say hi and I am THERE. Will follow again. But if they want to use Twitter henceforth to talk solely about…well…whatever…without me, they can. At least as much as one can on a public platform.)

Many may only use it now and then, from here on in, but from the feedback I received from my own class, at least, a fair proportion did genuinely take away some kind of real, hands-on understanding of participatory practices that I’m not sure we could have modelled for – and with – them without it.

And that’s really all I’d hoped for. I’m not a Twitter fan in any true *geek* sense of the word – I don’t find the platform elegant or appreciate the growing corporatization of the space, and I think for teachers working with younger students there are real alternatives that may still develop some of the communications affordances that Twitter does while NOT throwing everybody into the great wide open.

But out there, and only out there, in some kind of busy open network, can they get the sense of possibility that I think all the hype about “21st century technologies” in schools tends to miss entirely: these technologies are supposed to be connecting people in new ways for learning purposes, not just entertaining them.

At its best, Twitter does both. And #ed474 certainly gave me learning and connection opportunities that I’ve really never had with students before, this term…even just in laughing together on a dull Friday evening while we all stayed home writing papers.

And in the end, that felt like a kind of openness I could really get behind.

Tags: #ed474, digital sociality, higher ed, networks, participatory learning, teaching, Twitter

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