I have been enjoying reading your conversation in this thread of comments and would like to weigh in and perhaps make a distinction that will help to integrate your two viewpoints.

From the perspective of both philosophy and science, I see that your discussion stems not from so much a conflict of ideas as from a conflict in your perspectives.

My hope is to shed some light on this topic by making a distinction between scientific domains of knowledge and non-scientific domains of knowledge.

I will discuss Lenny’s use of the word “knowledge” within scientifically-accessible domains of knowledge then consider Dave’s use of “knowledge” as it applies to non-scientific domains.

I am trained as a scientist and like Lenny tend to believe that experimentation followed by rigorous analysis is necessary to produce verifiable knowledge. Scientific knowledge is not the result of large numbers of community members creating their own set of opinions no matter how well argued. The history of science is full of examples of “knowledge” generated by common scholarly beliefs that had no grounding in scientific verification.

That does not mean that I believe that scientific verification is the end-all and be-all. It simply is a powerful means of differentiating between true “knowledge” vs. opinion.

Why do I say that scientific verification not the end-all and be-all? For many human problems, rigorous verification is simply not possible. The most common example is the problem of human “love.” Human social dynamics are simply too difficult to reduce to a reasonable number of experimental variables. Poetry is a much more reasonable approach to understanding love!

Scientists tend to distinguish between the domains of “knowledge” that lend themselves to scientific analysis and those that do not.

I would venture that scientific knowledge has great value but has a very limited scope and doesn’t lead to wisdom, whose proper domain is the human affairs. And like Dave, I believe that wisdom can only be achieved in dialogue.

Anyway that is my synthesis of your two seemingly opposing views. I hope you liked it

Greg

Now I do understand why, since I’m not enrolled in the class, I can’t really be a part of it. And I am sympathetic to what I think I understand as your view: a course management system (or instructor/institution-created VLE) is necessarily a walled garden due to concerns about pedagogy and privacy, both of the instructors and students.

There does seem to be a variety of approaches. Some classes, like CCK08, are completely open and for the most part force learners to create their own systems which, as you’ve noted, creates a high bar. Others, like Couros’ EC&I 831 class, have a layer for enrolled participants and a layer for those who aren’t enrolled (which is what I was hoping would happen for your class).

I teach my online classes using Moodle (I have used Blackboard before)and as the instructor am currently feeling restricted by my VLE. In addition to technical issues of the hosting company (I can’t host it myself, and the site goes down inconsistently), I have to go into each class separately, the system doesn’t let me know when I get Messages which class the student is in, it’s awkward to set up anything “above” the individual sections (like synchronous office hours). As with Blackboard, I find myself linking out a lot (as Carrie notes is an option). Ultimately, I may use the VLE only for its handy gradebook and assignments functions, and maybe the asynchronous forums (I like Moodle’s nesting format), but not much else.

So thank you for pointing me to this post — it’s helping me reconsider whether I should throw up my hands and abandon VLEs all together (my typical response when they go wrong technically). I can think of a number of students who would be horrified to have their work read on the wider web, not only beginners but those who are insecure about their writing or scholarship. There is a confidence for these learners in being in the walled garden, where they’ll be less embarrassed to learn in front of others.

If the opportunity avails itself, I will buy the first round.

I was thinking about two distinct things. With the cults, I was thinking about true believers in unregulated financial markets, who maintained the belief in spite of evidence to the contrary, till the bottom completely fell out of the markets. Calling what they believed knowledge doesn’t do anyone a service, in my view.

On the new directions, the thought is that learning and knowledge creation is something like a sine wave. There are periods of intense interest and growth, then that tapers off followed by a lull. The next upswing might very well involve others and initially be the product of an individual or a small group. In a not fully appropriate statistical analogy, groups often regress to the mean. The next new thing comes from an outlier. At least that’s my sense of it.

Also, on the point of where the bar should be for the word knowledge, I suppose that depends on context. For decision making and management, I think it should be high, so we appreciate how much we don’t know, and view setbacks as opportunities for improvements. In this setting, if we used the low bar interpretation, every mistake we’d make would be a reminder that we’re a ditz for not having anticipated correctly ahead of time and give a false sense that perfect solutions are possible.

Having a mature view about uncertainty is hard. And it is important to acquire. So even in the classroom setting perhaps the bar should be high, but I can see a flip argument that the labeling of the activity could impact student engagement and anything that encourages that needs to considered seriously.

The dichotomy is in ownership… and really not quite a dichotomy as their is the possibility of third party ownership as well. In a VLE the landscape is controlled by the insitution, there are often many things that an instructor is incapable or directly ‘not allowed’ to do due to admistrative concerns of pedagogy, politics or security. The linear nature of our course page, for instance, almost imperceptibly (or not) forces into this ‘week by week’ linear approach to knowledge creation…

There are defintely advantages to this in a introductory course, as it can be very difficult to learn new ways of building knowledge, new platforms and take over ownership of your learning at the same time… a problem that intimidated many in the CCK08 course.

I didn’t quite spell this out in my post… and probably should have. thanks for teasing that idea out

I have a funny feeling that this would be a great chat over a beverage or two. It seems we may not be that far from each other after all… possible that I’m just lowering the bar on the word knowledge…

But I’m interested in what you mean by ‘starting a fundamentally new path’ are you talking about new kids of knowledge or new directions in a given field? Is this a connection to the ‘cult’ comments you made earlier on?

I think this is an excellent point, adn I think I should probably include it in the follow up article. There is certainly a sense in which communities can morph into cults, looking inward and backwards rather than outside and inclusive. Is this what you mean?