#engageMOOC – The Twitter Chats

(this post is cross-posted from #Antigonish2.com)
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So. #engageMOOC is officially underway, officially lively, and very much still officially open to people joining in, even if just to listen for a part of the conversation or dip a toe in the waters.

Or write a whole opus or three. Whatever works.

There’s a lot going on so far.  We had a first live hangout (that lead Designer Sundi Richard saved from confusion and delay) and that a whole crew of participants waited through 20 minutes of dead air to start. Huge thanks, patient people.

We migrated #engageMOOC over to Future Trends Forum with Bryan Alexander today, for a rollicking conversation that included an admission that I do not like to count, in research. ;0


But the best parts of the course are emerging where the conversations are beginning to take hold.

In our discussion forums, there are conversations about whether John Perry Barlow was wrong, and questions about online engagement and community and anonymity, and musings about social consequences of bad online behaviour and what we should do when the shouting starts.

These conversations are what the course is FOR. People have been responding to each other, connecting, being generous.

But. The container of EdX in which #engageMOOC mostly lives is a constrained space for a lively open conversation. All platforms have limitations. A platform designed primarily to deliver content rather to foster discussion has significant limitations for a course that aims to convene a conversation.

Enter Twitter.

TWITTER for conversation, you say?

I READ THE NEWS, you say. TWITTER IS WHERE PEOPLE LOSE THEIR JOBS & GET DRAGGED IN SHAME FOR FLOSSING INCORRECTLY.

Okay well not entirely. But Twitter, for all its *very* real issues – the pile-ons, the tactical decontextualization of people’s statements, the sea lions and the “well actually” folks – is designed for open, public conversation AND is still viewable even for participants who don’t have accounts.

The #engageMOOC hashtag is chock full of comments, requests, connections, distributed blog posts expanding on ideas…it’s happening.

We’re going for more.

One of the things we want to do in this course – even within its tiny pop up time frame and the limitations of our course space and our Google hangout provocations – is open up the questions and ideas people have brought to the table.

So tomorrow and the Friday after – the 16th and 23rd of February, starting at noon EST – we’ll have a Twitter chat, using the #engageMOOC hashtag. It’ll start at noon, and we’ll ask a question – based on participants’ intro questions for the course – every ten minutes or so for an hour. Participants can reply…or start whole new conversations and questions of their own, all on the hashtag.

If you want to just read the chat, click the hashtag. If you want to contribute, simply post or reply…and use the hashtag. If you can’t show up in the hour but have ideas to share to the conversation, the hashtag is *always* open.

Twitter chats are usually fast and furious. Do NOT feel you have to take it all in. You can’t. I can’t. Nobody will. It’s okay.

This in itself – this letting go and just focusing on the parts of the stream that you’re engaged with for the moment and letting the rest float on past – is a key web literacy, and (I think) key to getting any actual enjoyment from the web in an era of constant information abundance. THERE IS NO TEST AT THE END. Be wherever you are.

Join us, if you can. #engageMOOC. Try to remember the hashtag, if you’re tweeting. Answer the hell outta whatever question or branch or rabbit hole in the conversation interests you. Try to talk to some new people on the hashtag. Twitter, for all its faults, still has broad networks of engaged thinkers and learners and professionals of all stripes interested in sharing ideas…and a lot of them are in our course! The chats may be an easy way to build recognition and fledgling relationships – via follows – that you can take with you when our two weeks are over.

Thread your ideas (ie reply to yourself) if it takes more than one tweet to say what you want. That way people can read the whole train of thought.

And maybe try – if you think someone’s wrong – to offer an alternate perspective in a non-polarizing way. We’re aiming to practice what we preach, here: stumbling together towards a less polarized information ecosystem.

See you Friday at noon EST. Bring questions. :)

#engageMOOC – The Schedule

(this post is cross-posted from #Antigonish2.com)

Hear ye, hear ye…

Our pop up MOOC – Engagement in a Time of Polarization (#engageMOOC) – starts…MONDAY.

It’s only two weeks long, so sign up right here STAT and feel free to dip in & out however much works for you. There will be four topics over the two week run, some video interviews with people waaay cooler than us, one core provocation or reading for each topic, and one live hangout per topic. Plus some background readings for the keen amongst us…and some Twitter chats.

Here’s the schedule. Mark your calendars. Sign up: it all goes live Monday.

We’ve been thrilled with the uptake so far and encourage anybody half-thinking about it to just…join in! You can participate via the discussion boards, OR in the open – every topic will have a challenge we post publicly. You can engage through blog or video responses and post using the hashtag #engageMOOC. Contributions to the hashtag will be gathered and shared back to participants: we’re hoping for some distributed discussion, and welcome participants to open up new channels, too, as you wish.

The Monday Feb 12th intro hangout is a provocation in and of itself…we’ll be debating “Does engagement even matter today…and why?” Sign up or watch the hashtag to view live & throw in questions. See you there. :)

Engagement in a Time of Polarization: An #Antigonish2-style Open Course

(this post is cross-posted from #Antigonish2.com)
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The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here – within ourselves and our institutions.”
– John Dewey, 1939

Thursday, the FCC voted to end #NetNeutrality.

Okay, I’m in Canada. But most of the platforms and providers I use – for my teaching, my professional presence, my research, my entertainment, and all the blurry spaces in between – are not. They’re primarily US platforms.

So the repeal and what it means for education concerns me – even up here in the Maritimes – as a scholar, a higher ed professional, and a member of society.

(Sure, the open internet is a TERRIBLE platform for speech and justice. Point. But as Tressie McMillan-Cottom states very clearly, “the end of net neutrality also means the regulation-by-capital of online spaces where minority groups shut out of traditional media, politics, and economies have thrived.” So things are only set to get more stratified from here on out. That’s a problem.)

It’s not a problem any of us has a tidy solution for. But. Maybe it’s time to announce that some of us are convening an open conversation to try to grapple with some of what’s at stake: politics and polarization and participatory models for engagement and change.

From February 12-26, 2018, Dr. Natalie Delia Deckard and myself will facilitate a two week “pop-up MOOC” on EdX, with Davidson Now.

We want to invite you to join us.

Engagement in a Time of Polarization will be a discussion as much as a course, with provocations and live hangouts with leaders of this cultural conversation of the moment. Mike CaulfieldChris GilliardKris Shaffer, and (hopefully) Zeynep Tufekci will all join us, supported by Davidson’s Sundi Richard and staff, faculty, students and alumni. And all of you. 

It’s the next step for #Antigonish2, as a concept and a network. We’ll explore some of the history and legacy of adult ed participatory engagement, then dive into what this means today, across education, government, and media.

All welcome. Please share.

epiphanies: massiveness + openness = new literacies of participation?

I’ve always loved the idea of Epiphany as a holiday.

It’s partly the fact that it’s effectively a dead holiday, killed by its inconvenient placement after the commercial juggernaut that Christmas has become: even if Epiphany’s on your cultural radar, it’s most likely as a “best before” date for the Christmas tree. But Epiphany has the extra cool of being also a word, with a meaning that extends far beyond its origins in Christian tradition.

It’s the juxtaposition of this idea of “epiphany” and a day called Epiphany that delights me, as if one could just sit around every January 6th waiting for really good ideas to descend from the heavens.

Do NOT try this at home, kids. It’s disappointing. Very little truth in advertising from the epiphany camp, in my experience. And yet, pretty much any January 6th, I bet you could straw-poll half the English-speaking word nerds across the globe and find them secretly gazing expectantly at the skies, just in case. Some of us them would also be pointedly ignoring the abandoned-looking Christmas tree wilting in the corner of my their living room, but hey. Let us not speak of our others’ secret shames.
***
Anyway, yesterday I did not have one of the proper fancy epiphanies, with manifestations of God or anything – sorry, Mom. But I *did* have a moment where a series of disconnected thoughts finally clicked together and I realized, oh hey. I need to do something. I CAN do something.

Epiphanies – such as mine are, at least, which to say rather humble and not at all like visitations from The Lord, pity – remind of my kids’ toy trains. Except I seldom trip over them. But even scattered all over the floor…if you can get them into close enough proximity and the stars and magnets all align, snap! The pile is suddenly a single train, with some kind of directionality possible. Giddy up. These moments of transcendent synthesis are apparently the reason the word epiphany leaked over into secular usage in the first place, thanks to James Joyce (or at least so says Wikipedia, as my moments of transcendent understanding re Joyce are even rarer than manifestations of God).

Here’s how it went. Last week, at the end of 2013, I found myself loathe to write any kind of year in review post. I was no fangirl for 2013 or the general angst and disillusionment it left festering in me regarding academia and my own prospects after fifteen years teaching in higher ed. I figured this hesitancy on my part was no great loss to the world, but it left me thinking about what uncertainty does to voice, especially public voice. That was train car #1.

I’d also been thinking – as part of my ongoing dissertation research – about the conflicting concepts of success that circulate in academic networks and academic institutions, for lack of a less blunt distinction. I don’t believe the two are entirely separate – each has its broad constellations of semi-shared understandings, and there’s overlap – but my own experience of them is profoundly different, and I’ve been living in the middle of that and trying to unpack it. Cue train car #2.

Uncertain voice + muddled concepts of success = paralysis for a writer. For me, over the past year, it’s meant that my sense of myself as a writer has faltered to the point where I’d almost forgotten how central – and how hard-won – writing had been to me before I started half-taking this “scholarly” identity stuff seriously.

Train car #3 was, of course, a piece of writing. I published my first full-length peer-reviewed journal article last year, in JOLT. It’s ostensibly about MOOCs, but it’s far more a position paper exploring the possible decentering of top-down, teacher-centered concepts of education via massiveness, *if* – and it’s a big if – openness is fostered within MOOC structures (side note: HASTAC’s #Future Ed MOOC/movement launches this month and seems to be trying hard to actually do this).

 

Here’s the abstract, all official-like:

Screen shot 2014-01-07 at 11.24.23 PM

I wrote the paper almost a year ago now, but because I published it rather than blogging it, I’ve had little public conversation around the piece. It got tweeted a bit, and it’s been/being used in some cool open courses, which is wonderful and grand…but the kind of back and forth reflection that sometimes occurs here on the blog just never happened. And so when I was considering whether or not to use the article in the syllabus of my upcoming communications course and wondering, Bonnie seriously, isn’t that massiveness + openness stuff a bit idealized? I realized…I dunno. For years, my sense of my work has been that of a contribution to a conversation, a network. I didn’t notice how much I missed that. Until yesterday.

And then ye olde train cars of epiphany started to line up. CLICK.

I have spent the past year or so training myself painfully to try to write in all the forms my particular corners of the academy validate. I’ve done this rather blindly, as one aiming for desperate not-failure when one doesn’t have a clear enough picture of what success might be. And I have had success, in a sense – my proposal passed, my book contract was extended (sorry, JHU! MOOCs are…um…complicated), my paper’s been published. Other things are in the (slow) pipe. But in learning to write within the political economy of formal academic measures of success, I have lost something I valued.

I didn’t share most of what I wrote last year. It felt vulgar to shout “Looky here! Real live journal article!” so I didn’t blog about it. I stopped blogging about the book because the whole conversation about MOOCs got so fraught and so reductionist I didn’t really want to be in it, anymore. I didn’t share 90% of thesis proposal #2 until it was done, because the shame of struggling with academic writing seems a more terrible spectre than the shame of past-date Christmas trees. I don’t know how to talk about any of that stuff, or invite people into it. And so I’ve gotten lonely working away on my own because people are not in that stuff with me.

I’ve been researching hybrid scholars – people like me who are both cultivating some semblance of a traditional institutional academic identity and building connections and credibility for their ideas in online networks – but…and you may cue the laugh track here…I’ve been stumbling all over my own hybridity. I’ve been trying to be both networked scholar and proper academic, whatever that is. I’ve been trying to wear two entirely separate hats and engage in two entirely separate identity economies and…well, it’s a mug’s game.

And I don’t want to do it anymore. But. I’m not sure, frankly, which parts to drop.

That’s the hardest part about epiphanies, or at least the discount-version epiphanies I’m privy to…they’re never complete. A few trains line up and you pull ahead a bit and then some fall off or disintegrate or you crash into another and discover you need to change lines.

I want to make a career of scholarship in a time when the whole field of higher ed is practically in hiring freefall. I suspect, whether that ends up being my destination or no, I’l be – in the fine Myles Horton tradition – making the road by walking.

So I’m going to try to walk my way. I’m going to be hybrid.

If there’s anything to the premise that the potential of massiveness and openness = new literacies of participation, it’s those of us out here straddling the edges of old and new that will end up making and modelling those literacies, whatever they turn out to be worth.

And if you think that’s a ridiculous idea, I’d be ridiculously happy to engage in discussing it. Right here. Because neither an institution nor a journal can ever offer me the kind of space this blog does, for discussion of my work. They have their own spaces and values to offer, as do conferences and other conventions of legacy scholarship. I don’t think it’s either/or.

But if that’s true, we – I mean I – oughtta start acting like it, and stop re-enacting and internalizing artificial separations between spaces for knowledge production and learning.

After that, I’ll get that Christmas tree down.

Do you get stuck on the ‘shoulds’ of academic identity? How do you navigate fact that different and conflicting concepts of success and ‘good work’ are all currently in play? Do you think that’s always been the case, blogs or no?

the post-MOOC-hype landscape: what’s REALLY next?

My #mri13 keynote panel talk last week was on “the post-MOOC-hype landscape.” It was supposed to be about what I think we can do in the current “we have a lousy product” hype gulch before it all gears up again to bend the ear of NYT readers all over academia. And Silicon Valley.

The short version (see slide 4) is this: there are currently two solitudes in the MOOC conversation, and it’s not a cMOOC/xMOOC divide. One solitude – the mainstream media discourse – is essentially a unicorn, in the sense that its promises are fantasies of salvation and solutionism that have very little to do with the actual practice of higher education. The other – the practitioners’ discourse(s), broadly represented by the various interests around the table at #mri13 – is a Tower of Babel. Still, this solitude, loosely and cacophonously affiliated as it is, nonetheless leans towards discussing MOOCs in terms of learning. And in the wake of twenty-odd months of hype in which the dominant public narratives about higher ed have been all glorious revolution or ghastly spectre, I think it’s time to seize this (likely momentary) lull in unicorn sales and try to talk about MOOCs as learning. We need to make ourselves familiar with what the post-hype landscape of higher ed looks like, and address the issues and opportunities it’s left us with. In learning terms. On as many public platforms as we can. In stereo.

In other words, challenge the empty narratives that your administrators or your faculty have been sold. Find ways to talk about why what you’re doing matters. Change the narrative from unicorns back to what education is about: learning. End story.
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Maybe I got it wrong, though.

In the revisionist history of my own mind, the “post-MOOC-hype landscape” is now forever linked to the unplowed freeways of the post-apocalyptic ice-storm-in-Texas landscape that stormstayed plenty of conference attendees in Arlington for the weekend. I got out, though dramatically. I pretty much hopped off the panel stage and into a taxi van with Dave, Mike Caulfield, Emily Schneider, two gregarious business dudes from Montreal, and a most intrepid driver, who happened to have grown up in India and had never seen snow in his life. The seven of us, strapped into our seatbelts over a set of summer tires that God never intended for ice, bumped steadily over a barren landscape of exit bridges and frozen plains speaking – at one point in the drive – in English, French, and Urdu all at once.

One of the Montreal business dudes managed to educate us all about bee death while also inquiring which language Dave & I make love in. (Apparently, folks, French comes highly recommended.) The other Montrealer, born on the subcontinent, sat in front and instructed the driver in their mother tongue on how to keep us the hell out of the ditch. A giant flashing billboard along the way proclaimed TRAVEL NOT RECOMMENDED. It reminded me of nothing so much as a scene from Mad Max.

But there we were, squished together.

It seems to me as good a metaphor as any for where we are with MOOCs and higher ed.

That second solitude – those of us whose research and practice focus on MOOCs right now – are like the seven of us in that little van. We’re a random collection. We don’t all know each other. We speak different languages and have different ideas about which ones are good for what. And we’re all of us inching forward in a space rendered unfamiliar by a freak storm – in one case ice, in the other, hype – that nobody’d expected in that particular context.

I got it wrong in the sense that the real ‘what’s next?’ may not be grappling with the unicorn narratives.

I think ‘what’s next?’ is working out the conversation IN the metaphorical van. Some who see MOOCs as learning focus on the pursuit of its ever-more-finely-honed measurement. Others are more inclined to dismiss measurement as irrelevant to the networked synthesis of ideas that forms the backbone of their approach to education. A hundred more do something in between. We don’t necessarily know how to talk to each other. It became evident around the Arlington bar tables last week that the chasms between practitioners’ varying versions of learning and knowledge are so deep some aren’t even really aware that the rest of us are IN the van.

That blindness – which we all, me included, probably suffer from to some extent – is dangerous. It’s dangerous because people keep trying to shove the future of education as a public enterprise into the van, without asking questions of what counts as education and of who benefits – and loses – if it becomes seen as a consumer commodity.

I don’t believe data has the sole answers to these questions. Conversations about theory and Big Data being post-theory kept emerging in Arlington, and have flowered further in the blog-to-blog flurry of discussion that’s circulated since we all escaped the Texas ice (Martin Weller & Mike Caulfield have written posts that make great bookends on the issues the End of Theory raises; Tanya Joosten & Jim Groom, among others, held court on the issue at the bar). But the elite university data scientists are notably absent from this networked conversation.

There are more solitudes here than my slide deck lets on. And like the unicorn narratives, Big Data tends towards being a totalizing vision.

Ontologically, the networked approach to MOOC learning and the AI-rooted machine learning approach are very different animals. They always have been, and the fact that we’re even all in this little van together bumbling through the post-hype landscape is as much a linguistic accident as anything: one NYT article and two very different conceptions of the Internet happening to education got hitched together on one wild ride.

I think there’s potential in that: there’s a lot about what analytics can tell us that interests me. But algorithms are not neutral, in my worldview. The Big Data researchers bring institutional clout and status to the conversation along with what struck me, in many cases, as an almost entirely un-self-conscious absolutism in their approach to knowledge and learning and the capacities of correlative data. And that raises issues about the future and direction of higher education and learning, far more than unicorn narratives ever did. When I say the MOOC narrative needs changing, I don’t mean it needs to become a monolith – it won’t. Part of its power is that many new stories of learning and education can nest themselves within it. Nor do I particularly expect to change the data scientists’ narrative on MOOCs and learning – except when they try to argue knowledge as truth over my prime rib dinner. But in the post-apocalyptic, supposedly post-hype landscape that was Texas, the biggest ‘what’s next?’ I actually came away with was the question of whether those of us most deeply invested in MOOCs at the moment can learn to live and work together in any real way.

As George Siemens said in the opening to the very first #mri13 session, these are issues of power. Educationally, ideologically…hopefully not apocalyptically.

Hang on tight, kids. The next van ride’s aimed for Charlottetown, for #mri14. It almost NEVER snows here in July, I promise. ;)