Dave’s Educational Blog

Giulia Forsythe’s visual notes from my talk at connect 2013.

So I’m writing this book… (with some friends see http://xedbook.com)

And then i go to write the part of the chapter I’m working on about ‘openness’ in education and I ask myself “self, what does open in open education.* mean anyway?”

And then i fell down the rabbit hole. A rabbit hole full of paths from the Open University’s saving by Margaret Thatcher in 1970, to the table around which ‘open source’ was coined in 1998, and any number of debates on neo-liberalism. Fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

This post is a mixture of my own research and lots of v. interesting input I’ve gotten from colleagues on Twitter. I’ll make my best effort to mention those people who contributed… feel free to let me know if I’ve forgotten you.

Introduction
The story that I’m trying to tell here is about the values that underpin the word ‘open’. I know many of the people involved in open education/learning/educational resources as deeply principled people who are engaged in the idea of openness for reasons that are important to them. In examining these values i have found two strands: one openness that speaks of valuing the creator/teacher/artifact, and another sense of openness that speaks of the user/learner. Most of us, I would imagine, borrow from both sides. But this story is particularly about how the ideas of around ‘open source’ influence a pull towards valuing the creator over the user, and how that pull might affect the field of learning going forward

The brief retelling of how we got ‘open source’
The first article sent to me when I started this little personal quest was the meme hustler – Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk by Evgeny Morozov. Any of you familiar with Morozov will know that he makes his business in attacking dominant narratives and confronting the status-quo. In this particular post (which is very long, and, I think, worth the skim if you can look passed his anger) he takes on Tim O’Reilly for shaping the techno-discussion of era (and maybe more in the future) through his unique blend of brand development, crafty conferences and publishing supports. Now… I’ve always had suspicions about O’Reilly (see 2006 post) so I’m a little biased… but I’ll leave you to your own interpretations of Morozov’s broader argument, of specific import to this story is the thread of research i never made it to in ’06, and that is the original table around which the term ‘open source’ was coined and put into circulation.

So there’s (still) this thing called the Free Software Foundation. It’s founder/luminary in residence is a man named Richard Stallman. Google him… it’s worth it. Anyway… Stallman was a giant figure in programming in the 80′s and 90′s working on, among other things, a free as in freedom version of the operating system for computers. His views were very much about things being built with the rights of the users being foremost in his mind. He warned that if the users freedom weren’t paramount the software (and the people who designed it) would control things. hem. Facebook. hem hem. Google. hem.

From my understanding, Stallman doesn’t actually have a problem with people making money for a living. His interests in free are famously represented as being about ‘free as in speech’ not ‘free as in beer’. It’s the freedom of choice. He very much wanted everyone to contribute their software in like manner… he valued freedom in a way that was not connected to whether he made money or not, whether the not-free software might be better or more powerful. He judged the ‘value’ of the software to be used by freedom first and other considerations second. The GPL (his free license) and his influence on free software dominated that end of the industry.

After a long battle with Microsoft, Netscape lost the browser wars (yes, we used to say that) and at one point in 1998 a bunch of folks get called together by Eric Raymond (of Cathedral and the Bazaar fame) to talk about what should be done in the light of Netscape releasing (making free) the code to its browser. My interpretation (and there are lots of others out there) is that they were trying to find an angle on it that they could leverage for themselves. Broadly speaking people had decided that Richard Stallman’s ‘free software’ approach was too confusing for business. They needed a new narrative that they could use to profit from the free software model.

“The meeting’s agenda boiled down to one item: how to take advantage of Netscape’s decision so that other companies might follow suit?” Raymond doesn’t recall the conversation that took place, but he does remember the first complaint addressed. Despite the best efforts of Stallman and other hackers to remind people that the word “free” in free software stood for freedom and not price, the message still wasn’t getting through. Most business executives, upon hearing the term for the first time, interpreted the word as synonymous with “zero cost,” tuning out any follow up messages in short order. Until hackers found a way to get past this cognitive dissonance, the free software movement faced an uphill climb, even after Netscape.

[Christine] Peterson [who coined 'open source'], whose organization had taken an active interest in advancing the free software cause, offered an alternative: open source.

Looking back, Peterson says she came up with the open source term while discussing Netscape’s decision with a friend in the public relations industry. She doesn’t remember where she came upon the term or if she borrowed it from another field… http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch11.html

A shift in values
Take this quote that Morozov cites from O’reilly in 2001

I want to return to the idea of freedom zero as my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a “user” of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift. If that is power, so be it.

In Stallman’s words

The two terms[free software and open source] describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values.

In reading this (and this certainly meshes with my feelings in the ’06 post above, in Morozov’s polemic and with stuff like this) I see a value switch from a socio-cultural ideology (freedom) to a something else. A move from valuing the freedom of the user to valuing the freedom of the creator of the software. You might also say, and many people have, that it is a replacement of ideology with ‘practicality’. The removing of ideology from the equation. I don’t happen to believe this. I don’t think that you can ever be ‘without ideology’. We use some standard to judge what we should do, whether a project is worthwhile or which of two things should go first. For some it’s money. For some it’s whether it will help other people…

If you’re interested in more side by side detail about the difference, here are the two philosophies written side by side:

@jamesmichie @patparslow @davecormier see: Open Source Definition opensource.org/docs/definitio… & Free Software Definitiongnu.org/philosophy/fre…

— Scott Wilson (@scottbw) April 7, 2013

The value shift is a subtle one for most of us… it certainly has been opaque for me before i started doing this research. It is further confused by the fact that the ‘user’ in the Stallman case was still likely a programmer, where the user in O’reilly’s case was more ‘customer’. All that being said, I still think there’s a critical difference. The value set attached to the free software movement is fundamentally about user freedom first, product/producer second. In the open source discussion, the product/producer comes first, and the user may, as O’reilly suggests, take it or leave it. The purpose behind the creation and initial spreading of a word may not have forever impacts on its meaning, but Raymonds words are telling “In conventional marketing terms our job was to rebrand the product and build its reputation into one that the corporate world would hasten to buy.” Both Morozov and Stallman credit Open Source as being focused on making a better stronger product. Stallman particularly worries that this is not what you want as your first value.

What the hell does this have to do with education?
Frankly, I’m not sure that Stallman would still be right about his approach in a day and age where 99.9% of computer users are blind users of software. Pure consumers who will never understand code. It may have been better had things gone differently and we had stuck to understanding code and the machines that are so deeply embedded in our lives… but i’m pretty sure that opportunity is gone. Hopefully not so with education.

At many conferences and in many discussions I’ve heard people suggest that the ideas of ‘open source’ have had a deep impact on the open in open education. And my concern starts when that particular model of ‘openness’ is applied to education. In that same twitter conversation David Wiley, coiner of the term open content, suggests that the open of open content is by analogy to open source but different…

@sleslie @davecormier It started by analogy, so its roots are there, but there are critical differences between open source and #oer.

— David Wiley (@opencontent) April 7, 2013

How is it different? Does it value the user or the creator? As I’ve said… I care less about this in software (as i think the battle is over) but I care a tremendous amount about it in education.

Lets take a look at Wiley’s recent work with Cable Green, Director of Global Learning at Creative Commons. In their 2012 article on openness in education they claim the following

We discuss the three principal influences of openness on education: open educational resources, open access, and open teaching. From David Wiley and Cable Green in Educause

• The OER influence of openness makes a strong case for “extremely efficient and affordable sharing”. A business case for the effectiveness of open resources and how they can effectively replace (or partially replace) existing options.
• The Open Access influence is about the ability of a researcher to openly share their research and have access to the research of others.
• “”Open teaching” began as a practice of using technology to open formal university courses for free, informal participation by individuals not officially enrolled in the course. In the university context, open teaching involves devising ways to expose the in-class experiences to those who are not in the class so that they can participate as fully as possible.
  • posting syllabi in publicly viewable blogs or wikis, where everyone can view them;
  • assigning readings that are freely and openly available, so that everyone can access and read them;
  • asking students to post homework assignments and other course artifacts on publicly viewable blogs or wikis, so they can catalyze further discussion of relevant topics; and
  • using a wide range of traditional and social media, including e-mail, microblogging, and blog comments, to carry on the course discussion.

In each of these cases, we see a strong focus on the creators of the content being central to the openness. The first two of the three ‘principal influences of openness’ are clearly about the creators, and the third allows the user to participate as much as they can by interacting with the content that is given made available in the open. While I certainly would not suggest that the statement is as strong as the ‘take it or leave it’ take that O’reilly offers for users of open source software, I sense a creator focused ‘offering’ to the outside world.

I’m not trying to pick on David (and he can certainly take care of himself anyway ) but i’m going to continue to focus on the relationship between his work and open source. Here is one of the other resources that David sent me during this discussion around the meaning of open. He quotes “Wiley (2010) assumes common understanding of the term educational resources, and argues that open is a matter of (1) cost and (2) copyright licensing and related permissions”

We have a definition of open that has, as its values, the price of a thing and the ways in which it’s creator can license it. Here is the tie, I think, to O’reilly and Raymond. In an earlier paragraph, the long history of the meaning of openness as imprecise is cited from a 1975 book called “Open Learning: systems and problems in post-secondary education”

“Open Learning is an imprecise phrase to which a range of meanings can be, and is, attached. It eludes definition. But as an inscription to be carried in procession on a banner, gathering adherents and enthusiasts, it has great potential”

Later in the same paragraph Wiley suggests that the meaning of open has changed little in the last 40 years. This would mean, in effect, that openness is about making content available to students for free. I don’t want to spoil the point I’m making by taking too close a reading on someone i look up to as a luminary in our field… but i think there is a pattern of discussion here that focuses on the creator, not the user. To fully make the point, however, we would need to establish the Stallman end of the equation, the ‘user focused openness’, and to do that we must cross the pond.

Open as in “Open University UK”
I have long heard from my colleagues in the UK that there is part of the openness discussion missing and that it involves the Open University.

@davecormier what sort of thing you after Dave? There is an OU history strand to this

— Martin Weller (@mweller) April 7, 2013

This from the excellent Professor Martin Weller author of cool books and many papers, much of which deals with openness in education. So I decided to dig in a little.

Discussion with Dominic Newbould
During my debate on twitter I was sent a few messages from Dominic Newbould, 30+ year veteran of the OU who dropped this on me.

@mweller @davecormier @patparslow Open as in ‘unrestricted’ almost certainly originated from the Open University concept, 1960s vintage.

— Dominic Newbould (@DominicNewbould) April 7, 2013

I asked him if he would mind having a chat with me to give me a sense of what he meant. We had a broad ranging discussion (lots of interesting (to me) detail for a future blog post) about the history of the OU and what openness meant to the institution from the early inklings in 1963 to launch in 1969 and through the time he spent there from 1975 onwards. The part of that discussion of direct relevance here are the four kinds of open

1. Open = accessible, ‘supported open learning’, interactive, dialogue. Accessibility was key.
2. Open = equal opportunity, unrestricted by barriers or impediments to education and educational resources.
3. Open = transparency, sharing educational aims and objectives with students, disclosing marking schemes and offering exam and tutorial advice.
4. Open = open entry, most important, no requirement for entrance qualifications. All that was needed were ambition and the will/motivation to learn.

This position is supported by a quote from a recent JISC review of openness in the Open University
“The university was given the mission to be “open as to people, places, methods and ideas” by its founding chancellor in his inaugural address” http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/topics/openeducation/JISC_OU_CaseStudy.pdf

Or, to go a little further down the page on that 1975 book quoted by Wiley

“open has many meanings, and the aura of the most of them seemed generous and ‘charismatic’ – open-handed, open-ended, open-hearted, open house, open choice. ‘Open’ as contrasted with ‘closed’ carried suggestions demolishing or lowering established barriers between subject areas; of enlarging and enriching the areas of activity and experience graded as educational. It symbolized a shift in the relationship between teacher and pupil towards that of student and adviser.

Perhaps the most commonly used sense of ‘open’ has been the idea of creating opportunities for study for those debarred from it for whatever reasons, be it lack of formal educational attainments or shortage of vacancies, poverty, remoteness, employment or domestic necessities. Open Learning: Systems and problems in post-secondary education Mackenzie, Postgate and Scupham, 1975

Here then, we find a version of openness that takes as its starting point the user/learner. I certainly sense a shifting of goals in the Open University from its original incarnation to what it became and is becoming… but no matter. What we’re looking for here are core values. How does your openness influence the decisions that you make. Important to remember the comments that Stallman made about the difference between free software and open source “Different Values Can Lead to Similar Conclusions…but Not Always”.

MOOCs and beyond
I don’t mean this article to make any claims on what ‘values’ drive David Wiley or anyone else to make decisions. What I’m speaking to is the way we’ve spoken about openness and the values that one can extrapolate from that. When I coined the term Massive Open Online Course in 2008 the open part of it was the most important element. I don’t think my exact view of openness coincides with the ones that Stephen and George had (designer/facilitator of the first MOOC, so called) or necessarily exactly matching up with my UK friends or anyone else. Openness was very much about ‘demolishing established barriers’ of all sorts. It is a political act, regardless of how unpopular that position is to many.

I do think that with all the talk and work going on right now around the idea of openness and the way so many people are trying to use the word for their own devices that we need ways to talk about the strands of openness that appear in our work and see where they come from.

I think there is something fundamentally troubling about a creator focused value system for open learning. While I understand the ‘value’ of open content, and believe in it’s value, I think the fundamental decision making process needs to be from the position of the user, not the content.

I think the content becomes the neutral ground, the thing that we can all agree on across our politics and our feelings about what a just society could be. The other side, the ‘what do we want to encourage our learners to be’ the social justice side of this is much, much harder.

How do we want to open our society? That, in the end, is the open learning/education that I want to talk about.

you?

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Appendix.
Other research referenced in the twitter discussions but cut out of the blog post.

Note: The Margaret Thatcher part of this post I removed as I started writing it before she died, and have no interest in making my post about her. Here is the quote i was going to use and spoke about on twitter.
“quite apart from the political considerations, the unit cost per graduate produced in this new institution could well be substantially less than in the orthodox university system.” Margaret Thatcher on why they shouldn’t close down the Open University, 1970.

25 year old book on open education

Jim Groom Keynote on openness… which is classically awesome jim.

On the value of Open Access and it’s incredible importance.
“I recently met a physician from southern Africa, engaged in perinatal HIV prevention, whose primary access to information was abstracts posted on the Internet. Based on a single abstract, they had altered their perinatal HIV prevention program from an effective therapy to one with lesser efficacy. Had they read the full text article they would have undoubtedly realized that the study results were based on short- term follow-up, a small pivotal group, incomplete data, and were unlikely to be applicable to their country situation. Their decision to alter treatment based
solely on the abstract’s conclusions may have resulted in increased perinatal HIV transmission.” http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/84/5/339.pdf

Briefest, laziest history of Open the word
The word itself seems one of those rare birds that hasn’t changed much in the last thousand years or so. Open as in ‘the gate is open’, ‘public’ that kind of stuff. According to The Online Etymology with the exception of some racy connotations, it pretty much has always meant what we think it means… not shut. My favourite bit is “Meaning “public knowledge” (especially in out in the open) is from 1942, but cf. Middle English in open (late 14c.) “manifestly, publicly.”

I was doing an interview today and I got sideswiped by this question… It’s not like i haven’t thought about the future of education, I’ve consciously worked on it at a times. What I haven’t done, is thought about it in the last six or eight months since we started working on the MOOC book. As people have, for whatever reason, started taking that word seriously, I’ve found that my ideas about the futures of education generally and higher ed in particular are shifting. So… as my poor blog has been deserted for months while i procrastinate from writing a book with friends I thought i might jot down my response to my very interesting interviewer today.

Where do you see online education in 20 years?
Well, first let me say that I would rather speak in futures rather than a single future. I’ve had some interesting opportunities over the last few years to do some futures work with different classes and I’ve found that exploring a number of possible futures tends to draw out some of the different overarching trends that might be at work to shape the future.

Case 1 – MOOC kills higher education
This one may not be so terribly far away, but it is the thing about the way MOOCs are growing that I see as the most potentially damaging to higher education. As I wrote in my black swans for 2012 (i keep linking to this, because i will never be this right again) we could easily have 1 million (or 100 million) students taking first year physics online with MIT. We really aren’t that far from this being not only a possibility but a reality. I think that introductory courses are obvious targets for the x-style MOOCs. All were really looking for is a general understanding of a given topic, you could do the testing in a Pearson test centre, pay $350, bang you’ve got a first year credit.

While this may seem unappealing the impact to higher education, particular at bigger schools, could be catastrophic. With the decline of public support for schools, the students increasingly become a bigger piece of the funding pie. If those students decide to not enrol in first year courses f2f but decide to do them online (because its cheaper, because they could be in a 500 person auditorium or in an online class and it wouldn’t make a difference) the business model holding together higher education would be in jeopardy. It doesn’t take an economist to figure out that if you have 500 students, 3 student TAs and one professor, the school is going to make more money than if that same prof is teaching a class of 20.

Lets say you pay $1000 for a class… 1000 X 500 = 500,000
or, with the smaller class you get… 1000 X 20 = 20,000

The cost of the TAs isn’t making up for that extra $480,000. This is a simplification, of course, but you wont have to lose many of those first year courses, or a particularly large percentage of any of them before it starts to hurt the bottom line.

So uh… that’s a cheery one.

Case 2 – Analytics university
This one always kind of freaks people out. Terry O’reilly in his excellent CBC show “The Age of Persuasion” a few weeks ago told a story about a man storming into a department store to complain to the manager. It seems that his daughter was receiving coupons for various articles for pregnant women by mail. the man was understandably upset and asked what they were on about. The manager apologized profusely. Three days later the manager called the man backed to see if there was anything he could do, and the man, to the manager’s surprised, apologized to him. It turns out his daughter WAS pregnant. The store’s computer had identified a change in purchasing behaviour from her points card and had grouped her with the group of women most likely to be pregnant.

This is the state of analytics right now… where will it be in twenty years? I have heard talk in the last year of LSAT essays being graded by computers and giving the same grade as human readers. I have heard publishers talk about using analytics to not only tell if students are likely to pass a given course but also to send email updates to their parents about their progress.

A hands free, teacher free university run entirely on analytics is probably not even 20 years away. I have alot of concerns about a system that can tell me what kind of student i am, what i should study based on the kinds of responses i’ve given to previous questions and tells my mom how i doing… I really do. But it is interesting to think about. I think my biggest concern is that it always seems to me the analytics is alot better at comparing you to things that already are… and are thereby not only prone to overly defining who people are into categories but also stifling the idea of people creating things that are new.

Case 3 – Corporate takeover
This example comes right out of the futures discussions that I had in Singapore in 2010 the market driven credential. Imagine IBM looking at a shortage of widget managers 10 years out given their current employment patterns. What would happen if they recruited 20 14-year old teenagers right out of school and started their training right away.

As the process of ‘managing’ learning continues to become easier to uh… manage, I can totally see corporations identifying the types of students they want and targeting them as early as possible. They may not reach right into high school, but they could certainly take them in after high school. Why have them learn to do things an entirely ‘wrong’ way just to have to retrain them again when they start at your company

Case 4 – Community university
Imagine being able to immediately connect with the 1500 other people in the world currently thinking about the same thing you are thinking about. Imagine being able to reach out and find the one that could help you understand the thing that you are trying to understand… to form connections with that one magical person who needs something you need.

In a sense… that’s what we have now. It’s hard to remember what the world was like before the internet, before wikipedia, before a reliable search engine. Remembering the name of the younger sister… you know, the one from the sitcom… that was hard. What was harder was trying to learn something new. Imagine the next generation of this kind of access. Imagine not only being able to eventually find some of the content from some of the people who have ever chosen to write about a subject you’re interested in… imagine leveraging the scale possibilities of the internet to actually access them all in real time.

Why not?

Futures
These examples are all extremes… for which i don’t apologize. I enjoy writing for drama of course but more importantly i find it helps me think about the things that are important to me… and it helps remind me where we are.

so… where do you think online education will be in 20 years?

I’ve been tangled in a number of projects and have left my blog sadly neglected. I have mentioned a few times on the blog that ‘content creation’ or ‘knowledge negotiation’ are integral to the rhizomatic learning process but have not addressed the issue of content creation directly. I have been having such a difficult time writing lately that I don’t expect this to come out very smoothly… i just need to get it written

I made a hastily written comment on the OERU googlegroup newsletter around the first of november.

“Does any of us, in this day and age, want to be part of an educational experience like a MOOC where content creation by students is left out?”

What I meant by that, and didn’t really explain very well, was that given the connective technologies we have and given the possibilities for learning, why would we go through the effort of pulling a course together if only to transmit content. More on this later…

Here’s the response I received from Rory Rory McGreal UNESCO/COL Chair in OER at Athabasca

Sure, I would. I would love to learn more Irish history without writing about it. I would also like to learn fly fishing without creating content. How about a MOOC on learning the regulations pertaining to hazardous materials where you just want to know what they are. How about language learning where you want to learn how to understand signs or menus?
There are many contexts for MOOCs that do not require content creation. I would think that most courses should contain a mixture of both. Is it even a course if all it is is people making their own content? link to thread

This was a reply from Rory in a broader discussion on a topic I didn’t explain very well so it’s probably safe to say I’m taking him out of context. Sorry Rory! It’s been stuck in my month for a month, however, so I might as well get it out. I want to talk a little bit about how these learning topics that Rory is interested in might help tease out some ideas around

1. what it means to remember/repeat and how that applies to convention,
2. what it might meant to come to know and
3. how ‘creating content’ is about learning in a connected world

What it means to remember/repeat and how that applies to convention
Many of my courses over the years have started with students asking me ‘what they were supposed to do to succeed’. We all do this to some degree, our goals and objectives being at a variety of different levels from “learn to speak english comfortably” to “Have the ability to respond to questions of the future tense of the verb ‘to be’ in informal conversation.” I am comfortable with some forms of the former and not comfortable with most forms of the latter. A good chunk of pedagogical literature will tell you that if you make it clear what success looks like, students are happier, more successful and probably thinner. For a variety of reasons, that do go beyond my natural inclination to be a contrarian, I have never found this to be a good way to help students learn.

My problem with specific objectives in a course is that it means that, sometimes before a course has started, I have decided exactly what it is that people ‘need to know’. I have looked across a field and chosen the conventions (of truths if you believe in such things) that are critical for someone to be able to remember/repeat to give them the proper grounding for me to be able to say that they have learned. While there is great value to understanding language and how it is used in a given context, I’m not convinced that this is a great path to getting to nuance. It seems like we want to think of ideas and concepts as fixed at the beginning, as being definable, and then slowly learn that they aren’t. I have had friends in fields as diverse as medicine, chemistry and education say that the more they learn, the less they are sure we understand. They have to unlearn their certainty. They begin to see passed the conventions as they learn. I would like to suggest that we skip the certainty part.

what it might meant to come to know
I think of the process of coming to know, then, as the process of being comfortable inside the uncertainty of a given idea. To be able to repeat a given item of dogma or formula is not knowing, it is remembering a convention. As we dig into those formulas, inside the math or the medicine or the literature, multiple interpretations, multiple factions – sometimes completely contradictory – begin to emerge. We can, certainly, ‘choose’ a faction like we choose a sports team and pull for it… and inevitably we do this in different parts of our lives. But the process of coming to know is about understanding the places where difference exists. About being able to speak about the uncertainty and still be able to act.

If anyone has ever been to a doctor to get diagnosed and treated for something, you know what I mean. Sometimes many things are tried in an attempt to find problems. There are exceptions, things are tried, sometimes they work. Some prescriptions almost always work. Sometimes a common antibiotic can send someone into two days of hallucinations (ask @bonstewart ) It’s uncertain.

how ‘creating content’ is about learning in a connected world
There are many good reasons for creating content when we are learning. It provides an excellent method of personal curation of ideas, of being able to keep track of your work. It allows for others (beyond an educator) to be able to see and respond to your work. For some it provides encouragement to work a little harder, to polish a little more. It could also provide an excellent opportunity to explore other skills around publishing in numerous formats. These are all quite nice… but not what I’m on about at all.

When all participants create content, you have the potential for multiplicity. You can have a discussion from multiple viewpoints, from different contexts, from different life experiences. When different contextual beliefs are combined with difference in ability, race, gender, culture, race etc… a myriad of possibilities and viewpoints can come to the fore. When the course is opened up to the world, your chance for this increases manyfold.

How is learning different from this video?
I have been learning from Leigh Blackall for many years. He pointed to a very cool video today.

It’s a video automatically created from the wikipedia article on Networked Learning. If you can do this sort of thing from a wikipedia article, it’s a trivial process to have it produced from any other medium. I think it’s awesome. I think books are also awesome. But to go back to my original comment “Does any of us, in this day and age, want to be part of an educational experience like a MOOC where content creation by students is left out?” There are lots of educational experiences… like that video, like reading a book about Caesar’s Gallic Campaigns – but i don’t see them as an experience ‘like a MOOC’. Why have a giant networked learning process an OPEN process, if we’re just going to treat it like a bounded paper book.

• I would love to learn more Irish history without writing about it.
• I would also like to learn fly fishing without creating content.
• How about a MOOC on learning the regulations pertaining to hazardous materials where you just want to know what they are.
• How about language learning where you want to learn how to understand signs or menus?

There are conventions and subtleties to each of these examples. How would a MOOC about Irish history where you didn’t create (and see others creations) be different than reading a book about it? How can you learn to fly fish without a river, a flyrod and stabbing your hands a hundred times trying to get the fly on. (not to mention fish). What would the regulations MOOC be that would be different than reading the manual? All I can say is that a stop sign means something very different driving in South Korea than it does here in PEI… and in both drivers test they said it meant “a full stop”.

When we are silent, and our fellow learners are silent, we can acquire a great many things (other than naps). We can certainly get one person’s sense of what the conventions are. A great lecturer is a beautiful thing, and can bring many people to new layers of understanding. Having someone organize content for you, so that you can get first understandings in a new field or context is very, very handy… but I think that, for me at least, the affordances of the new connective technologies force a fundamental rethinking of ways of learning.

In this day and age
We have the capacity to connect with each other, to share experience and perspectives and to learn both from and in spite of each other. I’m certainly not suggesting that we should live in some fantastical utopia where everyone’s opinions should be shared and equally valued. Quite the contrary. One of the most difficult thing about learning with shared content is the vast amount of crap you need to sift through. Just like life.

The power relationship between a content giver and a content receiver is such that the legitimation of knowledge is controlled by the giver. I think we had to do things that way for a very long time because ‘memory’ and ‘paper’ forced us to move perspectives around in locked boxes. In this day and age we no longer need to shove subtlety into neat little truth boxes. We can learn things as they are, rather than as other people would try and force us to remember them. Learning to choose amidst uncertainty.