Dave’s Educational Blog

I found this series of questions directed at me from one of the more interesting people I’ve run into during the change11 course. They’re fair… i think… and a helpful way for me to reflect as I’m trying to write a couple of papers right now… so here goes.

I am struggling to see utility and practicality, just like Keith Hamon. I would like to ask:

In what way does your theory of rhizomatic learning change the way you teach?
It’s hard to remember, now, how it ‘changes’ the way i teach, as it IS the way that I teach… but there are some central ideas that I hold onto.
I think of curriculum as an output of a course rather than an input, so i enter a course with an outline of study, or a syllabus and focus on helping students build their own curriculum. This allows them (i hope) to construct themselves as Nomads. If you think of learning as a process of ‘becoming’ then it can’t be something that is enforced. It is a change that is individual and hard to track.

Change11 is about change, and you are part of Change11, so what do you want to change?
I think of the “change11″ to be about looking at change that is happening, rather than changing things. I am hoping to support uncertainty and responsibility in learning (among other things). I am particularly interested (as are many others) in supporting an educational approach that provides critical skills… not replicable ‘knowledge’.

Did the rhizomatic learning theory and reading Deleuze change your way of living?
Absolutely. It has made me accept multiplicity as an integral part of the human experience. I used to see opposing viewpoints as things that needed ‘sorting out’ now i’m willing to accept them both as valid.

In what way does it change your parenting and being a father?
I try to engender the same openness to complexity in my kids. It’s hard though… because the subtlety can be difficult for the kids. Not that they can’t get it… the problem is that the rest of society isn’t prepared for them to speak from that position. It’s hard to be a post-structuralist parent. Saying “that’s wrong” is much easier than saying “think about how that thing is not supportive of the kinds of things that we value”… but i think the latter is more useful to my kids in the long run.

I am an educational journalist and my readers are non-academic teachers who want to improve their teaching. So please do not use academic language, be practical.

What advice do you give to new teachers?
Be courageous. Strive hard to not be the knower. I would tell them that no one really ‘knows’. We are all on the same journey. Bring your students with you.

Could you explain the magic trick to a teacher of bookkeeping, welding, or farming?
I grew up as a lobster fisherman, spent time working in a lead silver refinery, and have been in academia (in one way or another) all my adult life. I have not noticed any difference in the ability to apprehend complex issues between any of these groups. Rhizomatic learning confirms the suspicions of many. There is no ‘right way’ to ride a boat through a storm, to use a crane to carry a 20 ton kettle down a floor or to write a paper. There are lots of wrong ways . These are things that we learn as we absorb ourselves into a thing. As we come to understand its context. As we become part of a context.
I say the same to everyone. There are basics, in every field, that you need to know. Basic language, basic techniques. These are not ‘important’ in a profound sense… but they are required. After that, we make our way. It is not possible to simply GIVE someone the answer to how it is done… everyone must come to it in their own way. This is something many people understand instinctively, be they tinker, tailer, soldier or spy. It is only when we come to formal education that we somehow believe the rules to change.

What do you tell teachers with a history of teaching? Do you want them to change the way they teach? Please do not explain your theory, but tell them ways to improve their teaching and the learning of their students.
I would never tell anyone to ‘change the way that they teach’. We all have different strengths, and it is dangerous to try and remake someone else in your own image. My message to the experienced teachers is the same as to those that are starting out… we do now know things for certain… do not tell the students that we do. Be open.

Your theory of rhizomatic learning is it important for students in vocational colleges?
It can be… insofar as people are actually learning. Many vocational programs are also very much tied to specific kinds of testing… and i wouldn’t want them to be distracted from them. They will have time for rhizomatic learning when they are on the job.

If you could introduce new fresh students at the start of their time in college or univ how would you do that?
I do and have. And i tell them the same thing. There are conventions that you must learn to survive in any field, academia more than many. Remember them. Learning is something else, it is yours to control. Care about it. Be open etc…

What advice would you give your children in learning? I bet you do not tell them “… the intensive becomes hidden under the extensive and the qualitative. …” (DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 119)
My last blog post was very much about this. I struggle with it. It is tempting to default to true/false with children. I try to create open ended exploratory learning… and sometimes fail.

Do you discuss your view on learning with the teachers in the school of your children? What do you talk about with them?
My children are still very young, so the conversations with their teachers have been fairly simple on this topic. I have iterated, many times, that i’m not concerned about them getting the right answers, or performing, but rather am concerned about how they explore, how they feel about being in class… but that’s as far as it has gone. I am very suspicious of the system… but so far my kids are learning a great deal. They are learning in a language that is not the language spoken at home… so there is much for them to learn. I’m not sure what happens after that. I imagine i will have deeper conversations with their teachers at that time.

Did your theory change the way you learn and study?
Definitely. I’ve stopped looking for the proper/right way of doing things and am more willing to accept interpretations that are outside of convention. I was non-conventional before… but am now so without the rebellion… with a more open mind.

The quite excellent work that has been done by Cable Green and others at in washington seems like the pinky toe into the water of today’s announcement of 2 billion US dollars being funneled into OER for community colleges and ‘other qualified institutions of higher learning’. The difference, of course, being that Cable’s has a plan, (and i think an awesome plan) and this is just money to support plans… either way. There is now BIG money out there to encourage people to build stuff they have to give away. muhahaha etc…

So, uh, dave… what does this have to do with textbooks
Cable’s project, and one of my hoped for results from this project, is about the creation of free (or next to free) textbooks for introductory courses in education. One of the most maddening part of being in the edtechosphdere is that we all know that if someone could just pull it together, we could have really nice, compelling textbooks that could provide nice free education to people. Five years ago, we were asked by the Nord Family Foundation to look into the idea of creating wikitextbooks for schools and pretty much came up with the fact that we just weren’t ready. This kind of commitment from the government, money at that scale, that much commitment to the idea of creative commons… this tells me that we might be ready to rid ourselves of the $150 introductory textbook and move to open content.

My dislike here is for a specific kind of textbook
I am not speaking about the collections of copyrighted, existing texts containing articles written by experts in a field. While I’m not crazy about this kind of copyright, it’s an entirely different argument. The works contained in those ‘textbooks’ are sifted from existing work and you are paying for the work of collecting these texts, pulling them together, and paying the rights (ideally to the authors…) to those who own them. It’s unfortunate that things work that way… but they do.

The kind of textbook that i mean is the one that is created to introduce people to various standard tasks in a field. Some of them are works of art written by a dedicated author after a lifetime of experience teaching a subject… at least, I’ve heard people claim these exist. I’ve never seen one. More likely they are factory built collections of barely passable material recycled from the 30 previous years of the same kinds of textbooks assembled by people treated like drones, with ‘authors’ who are paid at the end of the process for the rights to use their names, and then a $150 price tag is slapped on top of them.

They are not all like this. But certainly enough of them are to make the bar for being able to afford them ludicrously high. This kind of money (used wisely etc…) could fuel the kind of open textbook movement that could actually get entire states/countries to move to an open standard for textbooks, thereby saving crazy amounts of money, and making me happy (which is, of course, the main goal of any country)

Why I think this could be the end

1. The US government support of Creative Commons removes the risk from trying it out. The biggest impediment to innovation, in my experience, is the inability for government educational professionals to shoulder the risk of innovation. We have long said “no one ever got fired for hiring IBM” and this has stayed fairly true in our industry. The open innovators have been outliers. And looking down the face of the public and answering the “but if it’s free doesn’t that mean it isn’t worth anything” question has always been a problem. No longer. Someone else bigger leaped first.
2. This is enough money. In LAK11 we just read the bigger is different article from the 70′s. When this kind of money steps out onto the playing field, innovators from around the sector (and certainly outside of it) will come running. With this on the table even the most suspicious administrator will be tempted. (there are a host of problems associated with this… but that’s for later in the post)
3. They aren’t alone. A host of funders have moved into the open game in the last few years (if not on a governmental scale) and there are a large number of people with skills to provide excellent advice. Just today I received an email from Doug McManaway (who admittedly works for a social media comms agency on behalf of the funder) pitching the http://nextgenlearning.org/ wave 2 funding. With Hewlett, Gates and a host of others putting money into things that people can’t sell… we have a chance to reach that tipping point (if you’ll forgive the expression.

Ideally… what does this look like?
These will, of course, vary from person to person and from circumstance to circumstance. There are some trades here in Canada, for instance, that have a rigidly standardized testing process. Let’s take welding as an example. The Red Seal in welding test is exactly the same across the country. The curriculum is created in almost every single school, updated 100 times over in 100 places. This is a super easy scenario for creating a standard curriculum saving everyone (except the publishing industry) a pile of money.

There are any number of introductory courses that generally fall along standard lines. There are concepts in math, philosophy, biology, computing, english… that are pretty consistent across general lines. There are already likely way more OERs out there than we need to create first year textbooks for these, but, as i mentioned earlier, this kind of support gives the green light for more people to risk the innovation. These OERbooks might fall along general topics lines with a grab bag of options that separate instructors could choose from for each topic. Doing intro to Python? Use a little MIT syllabus, mixed with some OERs from connexions, one from Dr. Jimmy, one from Jane the python geek and two of your own. Doesn’t matter. And, I might ad, this is already happening… just not on a broad scale.

The third option is for different groups to create their own unique books and release them to the public. One of the biggest criticisms to the OER move is that it will remove the choice from instructors from choosing texts. This problem will start to fall by the wayside if 20 different groups create competing complete open textbooks. In the end, I think this is the model with the best likelyhood of success. One company steps up to host the site where we can all vote on our favourite first year philosophy open textbook (I’m looking at you Creative Commons!) and we’re done. Anyone can find a complete open textbook that is free to students.

And if the idea doesn’t happen?
The PROBLEM with throwing lots of money at a problem is that it attracts a number of people who aren’t otherwise interested in the problem you currently have. Two billion dollars is enough money to attract ‘professionals’ form other fields who are looking for a payday. I imagine there being sharks flying in from dimly shielded existing textbook companies claiming to provide “more scholarship” or “better rubrics”. I fear that this might sound appealing to the people giving out the money who are likely to have come from a system where this has always been the way of judging the ‘value’ of a given piece of content.

Broadly speaking, large amounts of money rarely solves any problem. The model that Cable is running out west sounds really great to me, all the more due to the collossal amount of money that already been spent on OER projects that didn’t really get very far. More money thrown on a bad plan doesn’t make that plan better. I hope they call Cable and few other smart folks out there and get good advice.

There is also the tricky problem about how we deliver these textbooks to students. If we are giving web based textbooks to people who don’t have computers… that doesn’t help very much. How are we going to deal with stale content? How is it going to be maintained over time? How are all those people out there who are worried that students will simply copy and paste out of textbooks into answer keys going to learn that that doesn’t qualify as instruction?

so…

I like the idea of free textbooks. Particularly for those topics at the entry level where we all pretty much agree on what needs to be taught. It gives us a chance to open specialties to people who might just want to peak inside or to those who might want to engage. I think the textbook industry (at this level) is an artifact of an earlier time when we needed to package knowledge in ways that could fit in a truck. I can’t believe i’m saying this… but Senator stevens was right… the internet is not a dumptruck. We don’t need them anymore. I imagine that this will cost good people jobs, and that they’ll have to move elsewhere… and that sucks. The emancipation of millions of people, however, I think is worth it.

We really need to do this, I think, and I applaud the government for taking a run at it. I just hope they engage the open community for help. Please. We’re all out here