I’ll go ahead and admit that I know next to nothing about Bing. I’m not going to lie: I actively resist learning about new Microsoft products. I’m an open sourcie all the way (which was why my underwhelmedment over the open source project Google Wave was so disappointing).
You don’t have to have any interest whatsoever in bing, though, to enjoy this commercial. You can just ride the wave and have fun.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1AwFY6MuwE&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
(hint: because I will entertain your guests with talk of the social revolution)
I was at a party last week when someone asked me what I do for a living. I used the opportunity to engage in what, in retrospect, may have been an ill-timed impromptu pronouncement about the status of the social revolution.
It turns out I’ll need to rethink how I use that phrase “social revolution,” at least in mixed company, because a tubby drunk man wearing a confusing hat walked up to me and tried to steer the conversation toward war atrocities.
“You can’t tell me,” he bellowed, “that the atrocities that are happening during the Iraq War are any different from the ones that happened during World War II. It’s just that we have more media coverage now.”
As I wrote in an earlier post, this is what I’ve decided to call the Space Odyssey mistake. This particular kind of error is explained by Clay Shirky, who describes a scene from 2001 in which
space stewardesses in pink miniskirts welcome the arriving passenger. This is the perfect, media-ready version of the future–the technology changes, hemlines remain the same, and life goes on much as today, except faster, higher, and shinier.
Lately I’ve been finding Christopher Kelty’s notion of a “recursive public” useful in thinking about what, other than hemlines, have changed. As Kelty describes it in Two Bits (available for download, online browsing, and modulation for free online),
A recursive public is a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives.
More to the point, a recursive public is a group of people who exist outside of traditional institutions (governments, churches, schools, corporations) and, when necessary, use this outsider status to hold these entities in check. The engagement of these publics goes far beyond simply protesting decisions or stating their opinions. Kelty, writing about geek culture as a recursive public, explains it thus:
Recursive publics seek to create what might be understood, enigmatically, as a constantly “self-leveling” level playing field. And it is in the attempt to make the playing field self-leveling that they confront and resist forms of power and control that seek to level it to the advantage of one or another large constituency: state, government, corporation, profession. It is important to understand that geeks do not simply want to level the playing field to their advantage—they have no affinity or identity as such. Instead, they wish to devise ways to give the playing field a certain kind of agency, effected through the agency of many different humans, but checked by its technical and legal structure and openness. Geeks do not wish to compete qua capitalists or entrepreneurs unless they can assure themselves that (qua public actors) that they can compete fairly. It is an ethic of justice shot through with an aesthetic of technical elegance and legal cleverness.
This is precisely the difference between 1945 and 2009. It’s not just that we have more media coverage but that, as Shirky proclaims, everybody is a potential media outlet–everyone has the potential to join a recursive public, whether impromptu or planned.
In fact, the notion that we can all engage in reportage is perhaps a bit too simplistic, at least until we can adjust what we mean by “journalism.” When Facebook users joined up in opposition to a change in Facebook’s terms of service and successfully pressed administrators to rethink and reword the terms of service agreement, that was the work of a recursive public, loosely banded and easily disbanded once their purpose had been achieved (if necessary, they will quickly gather again in their virtual space and just as quickly disband). We don’t recognize this as journalism, often don’t even recognize it as civic engagement–but for those who joined this Facebook knotwork, it’s certainly some kind of engagement. And what could be more civic-minded than fighting to define the uses of a public space?
The atrocities of war are approximately the same (though, as always, new technologies mean new modes of torture and murder). What’s different is the following:
All in all, it was a good party. Near the end, someone produced a Donald Rumsfeld piñata. We were going to hoist it up and smash it, but it seemed kind of…irrelevant.
A letter of support for Howard Rheingold’s Open-Source Education Project
I’ve been participating in a pair of hosted communities at Social Media Classroom (SMC), an open-source web service that offers social media tools for educators and students. If you’ve been following my posts on sleeping alone and starting out early, you probably already know that if it’s open source, I’m gonna be on it like Henry Jenkins on fan practices. (For proof of my open sourceness, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
Actually, though, it was the experience of working with SMC that led me to my open-source fervor. When I first joined the community, I didn’t even really know what the open source movement was. The experience convinced me that open source software and its younger cousin, open education, have tremendous potential for teaching and learning.
Okay, first, some background. As the main site points out, Social Media Classroom was started by Howard Rheingold, through a HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Arts Collaboratory) award, and is supported by lead developer Sam Rose, among others. The Drupal-based service can be installed for free, or SMC developers will host a community site for people who don’t want to install their own.
Okay okay okay, that’s the background, but here’s what’s awesome about the project itself: It sets up a goal of opening up education by offering spaces for sharing, collaboration, and remixing of class content via forums, blogs, wikis, chat, social bookmarking, widgets, and a load of other features. The “Invitation to the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory” offers this description of the project:
It’s all free, as in both “freedom of speech” and “almost totally free beer.” We invite you to build on what we’ve started to create more free value….This website is an invitation to grow a public resource of knowledge and relationships among all who are interested in the use of social media in learning, and therefore, it is made public with the intention of growing a community of participants who will take over its provisioning, governance and future evolution.
To that end, we’re launching an instance of the Colab as a community of practice for learners and teachers, educators, administrators, funders, students of pedagogy and technology design, engaged students who share a common interest in using social media to afford a more student-centric, constructivist, collaborative, inquiry-oriented learning.
Not to beat a potentially dead horse, but: promise, tool, bargain, you guys. The promise comes in showing community members that their engagement matters. Clay Shirky argues that in order to get a social group off the ground, the founders need to engage as much as possible (or as much as is required) to convince the community that their participation will be noticed and will make a difference. Focusing on the photo-sharing site Flickr, he argues that building up a critical mass of engaged members took a lot of early legwork:
Like the proverbial stone soup, the promise would be achieved only if everyone participated, and like the soldiers who convince the townspeople to make the stone soup, the only way to hld the site together before it reached critical mass was through personal charisma. Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr, said she’d learned from the early days that “you have to greet he first ten thousand users personally.”
When I joined Howard’s SMC group, I posted an introduction to myself which got a near-immediate response from Howard Rheingold himself. I was all, “omg Howard Rheingold TALKED to me! *swoon*” And you know what happened next? I headed right back in to join in on other conversations on the site–because, after all, HOWARD RHEINGOLD WAS PAYING ATTENTION. The community is still small enough that a core group of participants are able to recognize and engage with each other in a highly personal way.
For Howard, promise and tool appear to be linked. As a new-ish open source project, SMC is not perfect; but as my sensei Dan Hickey has pointed out, “open source software succeeds by failing”–and Howard and Sam have been enthusiastic about getting community members to identify problems and offer suggestions. In fact, my experience is that if you point out something that’s not working, they fall all over themselves to try to find solutions. This means that part of the promise of the site is that members can help refine the tool itself. (Hey, Howard and Sam: Do you think you could add a “search” feature so I can find past posts more easily?)*.
Okay, that’s promise and tool. The bargain is something like this: We’ll offer you a space to create a vibrant, active collaborative learning community, and we’ll respond quickly to problems or suggestions; and your job is to fill in the vibrancy, the activity, and the collaboration. Which is exactly what’s happening in the SMC site for two of Dan Hickey’s classes in the Learning Sciences program at Indiana University. (Alert readers may remember that this is the program I’ll be joining as a doctoral student in the fall.) What’s neat about this space is that even though the classes are held in a physical learning environment exactly 1008 miles from my house, I get to participate in discussion about the readings, join in on collaborative activities (like working together to build a pathetically measly Wikipedia entry describing the field of Learning Sciences), and–if I write something especially awesome, get included in class discussions even though I’m not actually present. To quote Eddie Murphy, What a bargain!
A map depicting the shortest route from my house to Indiana University
In making the graduate-school decision, I recently talked with a third-year doctoral student at a school other than IU. She told me that she recently got into an argument with a professor and challenged a key idea he presented about education.
“…and I realized,” she said, “that I’m starting to feel like I can engage with professors, like I know enough now to challenge them.”
Maybe I’m just too mouthy for my own
good, but though I haven’t officially begun doctoral work yet, I’ve been challenging–engaging with, asking questions of, pushing back on ideas of–professors on SMC for the last year. What I didn’t realize until talking to this student is that my experience is not common.
And this is what’s neatest about Social Media Classroom: It’s a space for thinking about how participatory culture and social media can change how we think about expertise, knowledge, and community. It’s no longer that a handful of experts can, should, or do hold expertise in their head and dole it out as they see fit; in a participatory culture, knowledge is distributed across media environments and can be accessed by people who buy into the promise, tool, and bargain of those social spaces.
It’s working, so far. So far, it’s working. And it’s why my crew (Dan Hickey, IU doctoral student Michelle Honeyford, ELA teacher Rebecca Rupert) and I are planning to work inside of this platform in the service of exploring Spreadable Educational Practices. Keep an eye on this space for updates on our work on SEPs, that most awesome of projects.
[Update: as proof of concept, Sam Rose responded to my request to add a "search" feature within minutes of my publishing this blog. The beginning of his response:"Thanks Jenna!! FYI, there is a search feature up at the top if the site (over to the right) 
"]
In a recent post, I reviewed parts of an important new book called Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge (2008, Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar, eds.). In that review, I focused mainly on a broad overview of the book and on the final chapter, which considered the future of the open knowledge movement. Today I want to focus on a chapter in “Open Educational Technology,” the first section of the book. This section, the first of three (technology, content, and knowledge), offers a consideration of various approaches to designing open learning environments. In the introduction to the section, Owen McGrath writes that “the term ‘open educational technology’ has broad meaning that extends well beyond any lowest-common-denominator definition such as ‘open source software for education’.” Key thematic questions McGrath presents include the following:
- How should open educational technology be built, extended, and maintained in the large cross-institutional and international efforts?
- How can the teaching and learning activities supported by the technology be evaluated in an open way?
- How do the perspectives of teachers and learners inform these projects?
In “A Harvest Too Large? A Framework for Educational Abundance,” Trent Bastson, Neeru Paharia, and M.S. Vijay Kumar consider potential applications of open knowledge to higher education, emphasizing the value of sharing and remixing of pedagogical content, which they argue will dissolve the silos that traditionally separate content areas in higher education. They work from an assumption that open knowledge does not feel to all like a panacea; they readily acknowledge that it will feel deeply threatening to many members of our society. They offer the example of baby boomers coming of age under the shadow of parents grew up during the Great Depression. For these “Dionysian offspring,” the authors explain, their parents’ “poverty assumptions–lie low, hide your wealth lest it be stolen, do not display emotions, life is full of danger–” were more than silly or nonsensical; they directly opposed the youths’ approach to life. As the authors of this chapter write,
We now appear to be facing the same cultural fissure 40 years later: Open educational resources (OER) are so abundant that the scarcity-based assumptions of educators are challenged…. In short, we are moving toward a knowledge ecology characterized by unfettered access to educational resources, choice, and change in the context and clientele of higher education.
Interestingly, the authors see learners themselves as presenting a significant obstacle in the progress toward open education–perhaps even more so than faculty. As they explain:
[W]hile some faculty members may boldly go where open education leads them, some students, despite their expertise in some uses of the Internet and IT tools, can be very conservative in their expectations in the classroom. They may come to college expecting that regardless of the IT toys on campus, in the classroom itself, their teachers will still tell them what to know and then test them on what they have been told.
This is only one of many potential and existing barriers, of course; and the authors briefly consider many obstacles. They imagine “a vibrant Web community of learners at something called Peer-To-Peer University, or ‘P2PU.’ P2PU would not be a ‘real’ university, but rather, a group of self-learners and tutors who work together to emulate some of the functions an academic institution would carry out, in a peer-to-peer fashion.” They then consider the obstacles to realizing this dream: How can a “vibrant” eLearning community be fostered when passive learning is so much more likely? How will people react to the decentralized authority of an open knowledge learning system? And, perhaps most importantly for them, “[I]f the remixing process is speeded up and a million eyes replace ‘gatekeepers,’ then is knowledge enriched or watered down?”
It’s an interesting thought exercise to imagine this Peer-To-Peer University–and it brings to mind an important issue that’s only glanced at in this chapter: An ongoing shift in how we both think about credibility, both in assessing others’ and establishing our own in a variety of online, offline, and hybrid social spaces. I wrote about this some in a recent blogpost on the online university phenomenon, where I argued that
While web 2.0 technologies increasingly allow us to offer expertise in a variety of areas, with or without educational credentials, the desire for evidence of expertise lingers in our collective psyches. Ultimately, we still believe that when our cat’s kidneys start to fail, the single veterinarian who spent 8 years in school followed by years of field experience can provide better advice than the two thousand cat owners on a devoted forum.
And we’re not necessarily wrong to think this way, at least in some situations–after all, as I explained in that post, if my cat needs surgery, I’m taking him to the board-certified veterinarian, rabid pet owners be damned.
But at the same time, those rabid pet owners may provide valuable advice that helps me decide when it’s appropriate to go to the credentialed veterinarian. And here’s where educational technology people like the authors of this chapter could learn a thing or two from people who participate, in various ways, in a participatory culture: They exist, happily and without too much turmoil, in the space between online and offline cultures, easily crossing the membrane and increasingly failing to agree to consider that there even is a membrane. Many people–and most young people–would agree that there’s little functional distinction between friends they make in face-to-face interactions and those who communicate primarily or solely via virtual tools.
In principle, it seems, the authors of this chapter agree; writing about ccMixter, a “community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want”, they explain that the ccMixter community often rewards its most talented participants with CDs or even recording contracts “so they could receive more exposure and social credit for their efforts.” In this example, the virtual community is the real community, regardless of its physicality.
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A visualization of the network of authors in the ccMixter community
The authors seem willing to bestow this gift on virtual communities that extend their reach into the physical world; but when considering physical learning environments, they seem less eager to consider a blurred line between classroom and engaged learning community. Take a look at how they describe the “typical lecture hall”:
the teacher is up front and the students sit in chairs that are fixed to the floo
r. Such physical inflexibility restricts (italics mine) how the teacher can interact with students and students can interact with each other. Software design has followed a similar pattern, favoring tools that support faculty, rather than student, management in digital space.
It’s that word “restricts” that hits a sour note. We might just as easily consider affordances of a typical lecture hall: It affords a certain kind of learning which has value in certain context, and it only becomes “restrictive” when people try to use it to achieve some purpose for which it was not intended or to which it cannot be applied. Even then, it’s not the fault of the physical space that people are trying to bend it to their will. As Clay Shirky writes, “There is no such thing as a generically good tool; there are only tools good for particular jobs.”
Followers of this blog know that I’m no fan of traditional or conservative approaches to schooling, but I do also see the value of considering what is afforded by a traditional learning space like the lecture hall or, more broadly, the brick-and-mortar university. And the authors of this chapter aren’t necessarily averse to this approach; indeed, they grant that
existing academic institutions do help to navigate through the human sea of knowledge. They organize it into majors and requirements to make the decision process much easier and more goal oriented. They provide a teacher and classmates to both guide and motivate. They provide a structure and a social context to help bridge students from beginning stages of learning toward maturity. They help students address issues of finalizing work by providing a schedule of “deliverables” (assignment sets), of matching the learner with the job market, of certifying the value of students’ learning, and the general issues of being a young person at home.
If it’s true that the traditional university has served and continues, and will continue, to serve important cultural purposes, then we would do well to consider what types of learning experiences it can afford learners who are preparing for careers that may not even exist yet. Given that P2PU is a kind of pipe dream, and a more hybrid learning environment much more realistic, we need to think of ways to not only consider what purposes the university is good for but also how to speak to key stakeholders. In times of cultural revolution, those who believe most ardently in the need for it are also often the ones whose language is the most shrill, the most strident, and most difficult to hear.
This is not to say, of course, that the affordances of traditional universities should or could not also be considered constraints. In the end, though, the constraints are more on our ability to envision new words and worlds wherein authentic learning experiences can happen and less on our ability to leverage traditional learning spaces to make these visions real.
I was recently notified that I’m not appropriately sensitive to how difficult the act of writing is for some people. This notification came as my friend and colleague Katie Clinton was finishing up co-authorship of a paper with two of our colleagues for an upcoming conference. I was in the process of complaining that my normal flood of email to the three of them was garnering little response.
“Why is everybody ignoring me?” I whined.
“For some people,” she explained patiently, “being in writing mode takes all of their energy, and they don’t have the headspace to think about other things. It’s hard for you to get it because it comes so easy to you.”
Fine, yes, Katie’s right: Writing comes easily to me. But it’s more that–writing comes easily to a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean they spend literally all of their free time posting to their blog (unlike some people I know). In fact, there are entire groups of people–I include myself in this group–for whom “writing” is inseparable from the everyday activity of making meaning of the world. This is a break from traditional notions of writing as separate, as requiring a separate focus, a separate head-space. Something else–something extra and much more complex–is going on here.
I’d like to introduce the concept of “reading with mouse in hand,” a notion developed by my colleague and friend Katie Clinton. It emerged through a collision of the work we’ve done for Project New Media Literacies on curriculum for high school ELA classrooms and our thinking about Spreadable Educational Practices (here and here) in collaboration with my sensei Dan Hickey and my mentor and partner in crime Michelle Honeyford. This work has been heavily influenced by media scholar Henry Jenkins and tech guru Clay Shirky, and we’ve recently been circulating the video below of Shirky talking about the revolution in and via social media (originally posted at WarrenEllis.com). It’s 15 minutes long and worth every penny:
Today’s youth, as Shirky explains, understand that a product that ships without a mouse ships broken. They exist in a world where writing is one practice among a host of generative activities that are inseparable from media consumption.
This is not, in some important ways, fundamentally different from the act of “reading with a pencil in hand,” a common practice among professional writers and voracious readers. The difference, though, is in what happens to the generative activity linked to reading: In the video example below (featuring Wyn Kelley, Melville Scholar and Senior Lecturer in Literature at MIT, and edited by Debora Lui, an alumnus of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program), annotation and ornamentation are introduced as a means of filtering information, possibly for future publication or, at the least, generative work. These activities adhere to a traditional “filter, then publish” format of information transmission.
In contrast, reading with mouse in hand adheres more closely to the “publish, then filter” approach defined by Shirky. In a “publish, then filter” world, everything goes live, most of it open for public consumption and appraisal, and it’s now our job as readers of all of that generative work to sift through it and figure out what matters to us or to our interests and work.
A few months back, I attended a talk by literacy theorist Deb Brandt, who made a compelling argument that we’re in a second stage of mass literacy. In the first stage, she argued, reading literacy was key–and it was during this stage that the assumption of reading literacy as a basic human right was established. This second stage, according to Brandt, is characterized by writing as a more common practice than reading.
“[People are] reading to write,” she explained, “and they’re learning to write by writing to people who write.”
Not only that, Brandt argued, but what we write is increasingly available for co-opting by corporate interests. “Your language is for hire,” she said, “and that’s…weird.”
I suppose so. On the other hand, instead of “weird,” we might say “complex in ways we hadn’t anticipated.” As physicist Philip Anderson says, “more is different.”
As a blogger, I write more now than I ever have, even when I was a graduate student in a creative writing program. These days, I’m up to thousands of words a week just on my blog, and that’s in addition to the writing I do for my day job, in emails, internal and public documents, and reports to colleagues and collaborators. What’s more, I always read with my mouse in hand, which is to say that I read with an audience–a public–in mind. As what Howard Rheingold calls an “intelligent filter,” I am conscious of my role as a sifter of information, a synthesizer of news items, a writer for an audience, however limited.
What happens when “writing comes easily to me” and “I always got good grades on my papers” become “I know how to act on what I consume” and “My blog gets hundreds (or thousands) of visitors a week (or day)”?
We can–and should–start thinking about ways to address the concern Brandt and others have raised that education institutions have not figured out how to accommodate the shift toward a generative literacy. Shirky writes that “the future belongs to those who take the present for granted.” It’s a nice sound bite, and as such, perhaps somewhat more sweeping than it is strictly true. But the deeper truth that Shirky points to–that a revolution is underway, and that no amount of nostalgia can turn back the tide of social change–is a deep, important truth that once accepted will change, dramatically and forever, the terms and frame of the conversation.
Good book on the open education movement: Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge (2008, Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar, eds.). You can purchase the book through the MIT Press, though an electronic version is available for download under a Creative Commons license here.
What makes this book so useful is that it offers up a framework, from inside of the world of open education, for analyzing–and, if I may be so bold, at times criticizing–the early fruits of its own movement.
Below, I summarize and review one chapter from the book, followed by a critique of MIT’s OpenCourseWare, one of the flagship projects of the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Educational Resource Initiative; if you want, you can skip the review and jump down to the meaty stuff down near the bottom.
The Review
The book is divided into three sections: Technology, content, and knowledge. As the authors explain, this division is intended “largely as a convenient and easily understood framework. Naturally, the three categories are not mutually exclusive. In fact, their natural interrelationships become evident from the very beginning.”
I want to skip ahead to the very last chapter of the book, “What’s Next for Open Knowledge?” by Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings. The authors point out that the vision of open education–”dramatically expanded educational access, more widely effective teaching models and materials, and ongoing, systematic improvement in teaching and learning as educators generate and share new pedagogical knowledge and know-how”–is more than just a vision. In fact, many educational institutions have embraced and joined in on a shift toward open educational resources (OER’s), and have assisted in the building of what Huber and Hutchings label, borrowing from their own earlier work, “teaching commons: an emergent conceptual space for exchange and community among faculty, students, administrators, and all others committed to learning as an essential activity of life in contemporary democratic society.”
How, then, the authors ask, do we continue to expand and preserve the ethos of open education and the teaching commons? “It is well and good,” they write, “to make as many educational resources as possible accessible to as many teachers and learners as possible. But, to borrow a line from the movie Field of Dreams, if we build it, will they come?”
Promise, Tool, BargainThe Field of Dreams question is one echoed by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody, only for him, the question aligns with entrepreneurial impulses to build and market the next killer app. The question, then, is something closer to “What can we build to make people come?”
Shirky’s answer is simple: “Promise, tool, bargain.” These three elements, properly aligned, he argues, will lead to success of a group relying on a social tool; improperly fused, they lead to failure. (For an example of how this does or does not work, take a look at my blogpost on the promise, tool, and bargain of Facebook here.)
Given that there are really only three things to worry about, then, why do so many new groups or movements fail? Two reasons, according to Shirky:
First, because getting each of these elements right is actually quite challenging, while getting all of them right is essential. Second, as with groups themselves, the complexity comes not just from the elements but from their interactions.
The application of promise, tool, and bargain of open education: Promise
Though Huber and Hutchings use different language, choosing to focus their efforts on two distinct categories–”Knowledge that Matters” and “Inviting and Maintaining Openness”–they are essentially considering the categories Shirky identifies. (Know that aligning Huber and Hutchings with Shirky is a somewhat arbitrary move; I might just as well have said that Shirky essentially considers the categories identified by Huber and Hutchings.) The promise, Shirky writes, is the “why”–why a person would want to join a group or use a tool. For Huber and Hutchins, the “why” is more aptly described as “knowledge that matters”; in considering this point, they explore the promise of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL), a program that
seeks to support the development of a scholarship of teaching and learning that: fosters significant, long-lasting learning for all students; enhances the practice and profession of teaching, and; brings to faculty members’ work as teachers the recognition and reward afforded to other forms of scholarly work.
To Huber and Hutchings, “knowledge that matters” is collaboration and sharing of scholarship and research around contributing to the improvement of teaching and learning both within individual classrooms and on a larger scale. This knowledge is built and shared around situated approach to teaching, a presumption that context matters. “In short,” the authors write, the momentum that the scholarship of teaching and learning has established over the past decade clearly points to the value of pedagogical knowledgte that is deeply contextual and closely tied ot the particulars of classroom settings.
We might say, then, that the promise of joining a program like CASTL–the “why”–is that it offers teachers the opportunity to draw on a bunch of lesson plans, assessment strategies, and so on to the immediate benefit of their own teaching practices, and at the same time offers a feedback loop whereby teachers can share classroom successes with other teachers. They give back to the community of educators and in so doing have an opportunity to influence teaching beyond their local environment.
Tool: the “how”The tool, Shirky explains, is the “how,” and in open education this becomes a question of how to develop resources that invite and maintain openness without standardizing or allowing for decreased quality of the content. As Huber and Hutchings explain,
Where traditional views of educational reform tend to assume a small number of approaches that can be “scaled up” and widely adopted, open knowledge (and, more broadly, open education) offers a different path to improvement, eschewing the “fat head” for the “long tail” (to use Chris Anderson’s now well-traveled metaphor) in which many approaches find smaller groups of adopters and champions.
Often, the authors write, the “how” is ensured in development of tools that allow for “close-to-the-classrom knowledge” to be captured in ways that will travel to other settings.” The authors offer the exampe of the KEEP Toolkit, which they argue provides a useful model that combines user-friendly features with readable and usable temp
lates.
The bargain: What we expect from one another
The bargain, Shirky writes, is where things get tricky, “in part because it is the least explicit aspect and in part because it is the one the users have the biggest hand in creating, which means it can’t be completely determined in advance.” The bargain is the–ideally shared–agreement between users about community expectations.
For Huber and Hutchings, the bargain of open educational resources is, put simply, openness. Openness, in this case, means both access and the spirit of collaboration and community. As they explain,
The “stuff” of open knowledge for teaching and learning is on the rise, happily, both in supply and in the variety of materials and representations of teaching and learning…. But having good stuff is not enough. Those committed to this work must also push for policies and practices to ensure that what is open stays open in the fullest, most vital way. This means maintaining access, certainly, but it also means creating a culture in which people want that access, both as contributors to and users of knowledge in the teaching commons.
First, they write, it’s essential to allow the commons to remain open for teachers across disciplines who want to contribute to collaborative knowledge-building, even if they contribute only infrequently. This, however, gives rise to a second concern: Questions about who can (and can’t) contribute. “Open education,” they write, “does not necessarily mean ‘free.’”
Additionally, the bargain in education is not simply between users and makers of educational content; increasingly, teachers and learners are being held accountable by outside stakeholders. (Most significantly, we see this in the phenomenon of testing the souls right out of our young learners.) Huber and Hutchings express concern
about how to maintain a space for educational experimentation and exchange in a period that seems headed for increasingly bottom-line forms of accountability, with its concomitant calls for institutions to make evidence of student learning outcomes available to the public…. At one level, the value of evidence is something that any responsible educator would share. Faculty care about their students, and they want to know that the resources they find in the teaching commons will serve those students well. The danger comes when high stakes constrict people’s ability or willingness to explore new pedagogical ideas.
Case Study: MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW)
Promise, tool, bargain. It’s a difficult combination to get right, even when you have financial backing, institutional support, and a critical mass of contributors, as MIT’s OpenCourseWare project proves. Let me be clear: OCW is a success, at least in most important senses of the word. But in its efforts to succeed, it has had to sacrifice some of the most important tenets of the open education movement.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll once again make clear that I am employed at MIT, though I am not affiliated with the Hewlett Foundation, the group that funds the OCW project, and not in any way connected to OpenCourseWare.
The project is awesomely ambitious. As the OCW site explains,
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity. By November 2007, MIT completed the initial publication of virtually the entire curriculum, over 1,800 courses in 33 academic disciplines.
And that’s the modest explanation. In a February 2007 report on Open Educational Resource projects funded by the Hewlett Foundation, Atkins, Brown, and Hammond exclaim:
This world-changing project emerged from MIT faculty and administrators who asked themselves the following question: “How is the Internet going to be used in education and what is our university going to do about it?”The answer from the MIT faculty was this: “Use it to provide free access to the primary materials for virtually all our courses. We are going to make our educational material available to students, faculty, and other learners, anywhere in the world, at any time, for free.”
Fantastic premise, right? And MIT, backed by Hewlett, is putting its money where its mouth is, investing resources into the continued and ongoing development of OCW. The result is a fabulous early stab at an open education resource, one that really does offer high-quality content to the general public–absolutely free.
It turns out, though, that while OpenCourseWare is strong on promise (“You can access course content from some of the greatest minds of this generation!”) and bargain (“…and it’s all free!”), it’s still a little light on tool (“…but genius is not included.”). As I mentioned in a previous post, I read voraciously and omnivorously in my capacity as the primary blogger for sleeping alone and starting out early. One place I never, look, though, is on paid-content news sources like the Wall Street Journal. Another place I never look is OpenCourseWare. Why? It kinda…well, first, the download process is confusing, and once you successfully figure it out, you’re rewarded with a file folder that looks a lot like this:
Assuming you eventually manage to extract the relevant content, all you really get is a pile of .pdfs, a syllabus, and some course notes. The brilliance, the spark, the certain something that makes a class a mind-blowing experience…that’s not available for download.
And, of course, there’s the cost involved: Approximately $25,000 per uploaded course, according to the Hewlett report. Add it up: 1,800 courses means $45 million. (Just FYI, that’s enough to cover four years of public college for more than 6,800 students, according to stats from the College Board.)
OpenCourseWare is an admirable, but so far unsustainable, model for opening up education–especially since OCW seems to prohibit free appropriation and remixing of course materials. As the site explains under the FAQ category of intellectual property,
The intellectual property policies created for MIT OpenCourseWare are clear and consistent with other policies for scholarly materials used in education. Faculty retain ownership of most materials prepared for MIT OpenCourseWare, following the MIT policy on textbook authorship. MIT retains ownership only when significant use has been made of the Institute’s resources. If student course work is placed on the MIT OpenCourseWare site, then copyright in the work remains with the student.
These are meaty issues for Hewlett, OCW, and the ope
n education movement to keep working on. As goes OpenCourseWare, after all, so goes the movement.
A Modest Proposal: integrating Spreadable Educational Practices into Hewlett’s Open Educational Resources Initiative
Because of my interest in spreadable educational practices and in the open source movement, I’ve been drawn lately to the work of the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Educational Resource (OER) Initiative. The goal of this initiative is, as Hewlett puts it, “making high quality educational content and tools freely available on the Web.”
(Now you’re going to ask me why a foundation whose money is linked to Hewlett Packard, the largest technology company in the world, would fund an initiative that seems to run counter to its profit motives. Apparently, the Hewlett Foundation, though originally established by HP co-founder William Hewlett, is run completely independent of the company–which may explain why so much of its money goes to so many amazing projects.)
The Hewlett Foundation has invested a good deal of its resources into the OER initiative, funding research into three distinct categories of OER resources (these categories come from the OER movement in general, and not from Hewlett’s website, though they do apply to OER grantees):
A 2007 report, “A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement” (Atkins, Daniel E.; Brown, John Seely; & Hammond, Allen L.), discusses multiple resources made available through the OER Initiative and presents a logic model for the initiative itself:
The report identifies key projects that have emerged out of Hewlett’s OER Initiative, including MIT’s OpenCourseWare project, the Connexions Project at Rice University, open content work at Utah State University Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, and Creative Commons and Internet Archives.
Significantly, while these and other resources discussed in the report point to a great deal of enthusiasm for the OER movement (which, by the way, extends far beyond the funding of this single initiative), the authors also point to challenges to the movement. Aaaand here those challenges are:
At the moment, I’m most interested in the first challenge, sustainability. As the report explains,
A challenge of any fixed-term, externally funded initiative is long-term sustainability by an entity other than the original investor, in this case the Hewlett Foundation. In the MIT project, bringing a course to the OCW costs approximately $25,000 per course plus maintenance and enhancement. The MIT OCW model involves professional staff taking course material in almost any form from faculty and bringing it into a uniform, professional format. This was appropriate for the rapid startup of a large-scale, pioneering project but it will not work for many other places.
May I suggest…a consideration of spreadable educational practices? While it’s true that the above challenges are significant, they are not insurmountable–insofar as the work of open education focuses on fostering and helping to spread effective educational practices instead of disseminating effective instructional routines. MIT’s OCW and the other Hewlett programs work from an assumption that porting, curating, and maintaining instructional materials to a central online resource is valuable. And don’t get me wrong, it IS valuable. It’s also quite expensive and, by the way, only partially hooked in to the general ethos of the open source movement. As I explained in a previous post, open source culture
is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include collage, found footage film, music, and appropriation art. Open source culture is one in which fixations, works entitled to copyright protection, are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organizations.
Hewlett’s work links up with the “free sharing” and “general availability of copyrighted materials” aspects, but so far it seems to be missing the link to the spirit of open source: the free, voluntary, and creative exchange of ideas and work for the purpose of helping the community. While the resources funded by Hewlett are a valuable–perhaps even essential–beginning to the work of the open education movement, the resources matter only to the extent that the practices contained within these resources can spread.
It does appear that Hewlett is headed in this direction with its current emphasis on research and development of open participatory learning environments and on teacher training. As the OER Initiative homepage argues,
The ability of users and experts to give feedback online and modify open content enables the rapid improvement, development, and adaptation of material to fit different purposes, languages, and cultures. This aspect of openness helps equalize access to high-quality and useful materials and engages users in making content changes that create efficiencies and reduce costs. Further, when students and teachers transform materials, this itself is a creative, powerful act of learning. Together, the two broad dimensions of openness give us opportunities to rethink traditional notions of where, when, and how people teach and learn, so that we can explore alternative paths to meet educational demand.
Agreed, agreed, agreed.
I’ve been working recently with my sensei, Dan Hickey, and my mentor and partner in crime, Michelle Honeyford, on a series of blogposts about “spreadable educational practices.” The concept draws from the work of Henry Jenkins (full disclosure: he’s my boss) in a white paper for the Convergence Culture Consortium entitled “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead.” This white paper, serialized and published on Henry’s blog, contrasts the notions of sticky media (think of sites that pull you in and keep you there, “Godfather”-style: Amazon, eBay) and spreadable media (media that you want to forward on to friends—think Kittens, Inspired by Kittens; think the T-Mobile Dance at Liverpool Train Station).
In taking up this idea and applying it to the field of education, we’ve considered what makes practices spread within a classroom and between teachers. We contrast what we call Spreadable Educational Practices (SEPs) with Disseminated Instructional Routines (DIRs)–material developed by institutions and delivered, intact, and intended to be unpacked and presented intact to a class. DIRs are intended to be “sticky” in the sense that the organizations that develop and disseminate them–often the same organizations that make the standardized tests mandated by legislation like the No Child Left Behind Act–intend to pull teachers in and hold on to them by making these instructional routines effectively mandatory for success on the Big Tests. Spreadable educational practices, on the other hand, are practices that lead to success in the classroom–and, by extension, on those silly mandated tests–and are designed to spread to other classrooms, given the mechanisms to allow this kind of spread. We argue that considering what makes a practice spreadable and the means by which it spreads will result in a shift in how we think about education. 
You can read more about why Jenkins et al. believe spreadability is a more useful notion than terms like “viral media” or memes here; you can read our first two posts taking up the notion of spreadability here and here. (And if you’re interested in a brief summary of the conversation between those blogs, you can read the summaries of these posts at sleeping alone and starting out early here and here.)
There’s lots to say about the difference between SEPs and the more traditional notion of “practices that travel”, and lots more to say about spreadability in general; I’ll leave it to Henry and to the posts Dan, Michelle, and I are generating over at Project New Media Literacies to get that done. In this post, I want to focus on a consideration of the similarities and differences between the spreadability model and the open source movement.
Though I’ve written some on this blog about the open source software movement, this is in fact only a small part of the open source movement writ large. As Wikipedia explains,
Open source culture is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include collage, found footage film, music, and appropriation art. Open source culture is one in which fixations, works entitled to copyright protection, are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organizations.
On the surface, this definition seems to align with the description of Jenkins et al. of the position of consumers in a participatory culture:
Consumers, both individually and collectively, exert agency in the spreadability model: they are not impregnated with media messages; they select material that matters to them from the much broader array of media content on offer. They do not simply pass along static content; they transform the content so that it better serves their own social and expressive needs. Content does not remain in fixed borders but rather it circulates in unpredicted and often unpredictible directions, not the product of top-down design but rather of a multitude of local decisions made by autonomous agents negotiating their way through diverse cultural spaces.
Consumers do not simply consume; they recommend content they like to their friends who recommend it to their friends who recommend it on down the line. They do not simply “buy” cultural goods; they “buy into” a cultural economy which respects and rewards their participation. Nothing spreads widely in the new digital economy unless it engages and serves the interests of both consumers and producers. Otherwise, the circulation gets blocked by one side or the other, either through corporations constructing road blocks (legal or technical) upon its spread or through consumers refusing to circulate content which fails to serve their interests. Nothing generates value in this new digital economy unless the transaction is seen as meaningful to all involved.
Importantly, the spreadability model emphasizes the tension between media consumers and media producers–a tension described by Jenkins et al. as the conflict between a commodity culture and a gift economy. Though you can read more about these notions in the C3 white paper, briefly: Gift economy is the phenomenon of building social structures and social capital around the giving and receiving of gifts, whereas commodity culture considers the cash value of all goods and services.
As Jenkins et al. rightly point out, in a culture where commodity culture and the gift economy collide (they give the example of the language of “file sharing” vs. “software piracy”),
[f]ocusing on…spreadability may thus offer us some tentative first steps towards renegotiating the social contract between media producers and consumers in a way which may be seen as legitimate and mutually rewarding to all involved.
In general, despite the relatively obvious conflicting interests of these two value systems, both define themselves in terms of “success”: A successful gift is one the giver values, and it therefore “buys” you cultural capital. A successful commodity is one the buyer wants, and is therefore willing to spend money on. The notion of “spreadability” relies on an assumption that content spreads when it is of value to a community–that is, when a person thinks other people like her will enjoy a certain link, commercial, song, product, and so on. Producers of content are hard at work analyzing that inscrutable kernel of a thing that makes it valuable.
This is a fantastic way of thinking through the issues tied to sticky and spreadable media, but not quite so applicable to the open source ethos where, as Clay Shirky explains, you get “failure for free.” Indeed, OSS is premised on the foundational need for failure in order to arrive at success. (For more on the “failure for free” model, you can either read Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody OR you can read a previous post on sleeping alone, “What open source can teach us about failure.”)
Additionally, in the OSS movement spreadability matters very little or not at all, because–and this is essential–there is no money to be made, and therefore no conflict between producers and consumers. In fact, as Shirky explains, the most successful OSS product of all time, Linux, succeeded precisely because its key developer, Linus Torvalds, made it clear from the beginning that he did not intend to make money off of the result.
Shirky writes:
What the open source movement teaches us is that the communal can be at least as durable as the commercial. For any given piece of software, the question, “Do the people who like it take care of each other?” turns out to be a better predictor of success than “What’s the business model?”
In the OSS model, there is effectively no distinction between producer and consumer: We are all always already both, at least potentially. It means, not to stick too closely to Shirky (but I will), that “the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.”
Okay, so what does this mean for education? My answer: I don’t know yet. But think about the possibilities: What if we could change the question from “Will this help our students succeed in school (read: help our students do well on the crazy standardized tests that stand at the gates of every school)?” to something like “Do the people (students, learners, researchers) involved in this learning environment help each other to participate in the practice of knowledge-building?”
I encountered this pure, shameless propaganda for a new Microsoft product funny commercial over at Talent imitates, genius steals.
The blog’s author, Faris Yakob, does a fantastic job of zeroing right in on what’s going on with this commercial. As he explains, “The cool thing about being this huge gray corporation is that every time you don’t act like it, it’s awesome.”
It’s true: If a company makes awesome commercials, we’ll overlook or forget that, for example, Microsoft’s abysmal environmental record secured its position at the second from the bottom in Greenpeace’s Greener Electronics Guide.
Microsoft appears to be banking on the “coolness” strategy to make us forget their unofficial corporate mantra: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. And, in fact, to forget the host of criticisms leveled at Microsoft for unethical, unfair, or even outright criminal business practices.
In a previous post, I outed myself as a fan of the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, a movement that appeals to my secret libertarian streak. The open source movement also happens to make neat commercial campaigns.
Now, here’s the issue that the OSS movement has yet to overcome: I am fully convinced, yet I continue to use Microsoft products in my daily life. It’s easier, after all, than figuring out the details of installing, say, Linux on my laptop. It’s easier to use Microsoft Word for my word processing needs, even though OpenOffice, as its homepage explains,
is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.
Easy, compatible, open source, free. Yet I’m not using it. The dangerous entropy of apathy, my friends, is the issue that the OSS movement has yet to overcome.
Contrary to popular opinion, I do hold down a day job in addition to my blogging responsibilities here at sleeping alone. Fortunately for me, a significant chunk of my day job requires blogging about what I do. Recently, I’ve been working on a series of blogposts about spreadable educational practices with my sensei, Dan Hickey, and my mentor and partner in crime, Michelle Honeyford. You can read the first of several planned posts, “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Current Educational Practice,” here.
This first post aligns a series of arguments about educational practices with media scholar Henry Jenkins’ take on spreadable media. As I explained in a previous post on sleeping alone, Henry considers the conflict between the commodity culture, in which everything is for sale, and the gift economy, in which social capital is developed through the giving and receiving of gifts. I wrote:
Borrowing from Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Jenkins explains that in a gift economy,
[t]he circulation of goods is not simply symbolic of the social relations between participants; it helps to constitute them. Hyde identifies three core obligations which are shared among those who participate in a gift economy: “the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate.” (p.xxi) Each of these acts help to break down boundaries between participants, reflecting a commitment to good relations and mutual welfare.
Jenkins takes up Hyde’s notion of the difference between “value” and “worth,” focusing on Hyde’s argument that “a commodity has value… A gift has worth.” Value, in this case, means the exchange rate of a good: Cash for the merchandise. Worth, on the other hand, is the extra-economic value of a good: Its emotional meaning to us.
Given this conflict, then, what spreads via new media–the gifts we give each other (think Kittens, Inspired by Kittens; think the T-Mobile Dance at Liverpool Train Station)–does not always necessarily align with what’s sellable. In other words, what makes something spreadable may exist independent of its economic value. In “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Current Educational Practice,” we argue that
the critiques that Jenkins and colleagues level at prevailing conceptualizations of the transmission and construction of ideas in media have a lot in common with the way instructional routines are transmitted to educators and then presented to students. Traditionally these ideas have been transmitted via textbooks and other formal curricular materials. As with traditional media, this “filter then publish” model made sense given the costs of publishing traditional textbooks and the relatively modest canon of knowledge school children needed to learn but is increasingly cumbersome, ineffectual, and inefficient in an environment that allows for on-demand publishing and dissemination of material. We think that the emerging “publish then filter” media model made possible by digital social networks can revolutionize the way we identify, refine, and share worthwhile curricular practices. We believe that such an approach can accommodate learning needs in a world where the feasibility and usefulness of learning a core body of content is decreasing.
Future blogposts on this topic will explore why disseminated instructional routines (DIR’s), curricula produced and broadly disseminated by initiatives such as the US Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse, will fail to impact education generally or achievement more narrowly, for many of the same reasons that Henry Jenkins argues that corporate attempts to create viral media messages fail as well. We will also introduce and explore the notion of spreadable educational practices (SEP) to consider methods of leveraging the affordances of participatory media to work toward a vision of a participatory classroom structured around a participatory assessment model.
You guys, I think this is gonna be huge. The implications for educators and researchers are enormous, and the implications for media scholars interested in education are equally big. I’m pretty lucky to have the chance to join in on it. In case it wasn’t yet clear, I’m snoopy dancing all over the place over here.
"you don't just give up / you don't just let things happen / you make a stand / you say no //"
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