Chris Lott

I’ve seen activities from his open class activities in the past, but meeting Alec Couros in person at Open Ed strengthened my resolve and I’ve signed up to participate as a (non-credit earning) learner in his Open Access Course EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education. The amount of time I’ll have to participate is unclear—and subject to forces outside my control—but enjoying the freedom of participating at my own pace and in the way(s) that work best for me is one of the great things about Alec sharing this experience with the world.

Check out the EC&I 831 course wiki for more information and, if interested, to sign up.

[Ken Freedman at Open Ed 2009] 

I was excited to hear Ken Freedman discuss the idea of the gift economy in his Open Education 2009 Keynote. Freedman cited gift economics as a fundamental mechanism driving the ongoing transformation of legendary WFMU from a free-form radio station operating in the traditional mode to a modern-day web media entity that works in the contemporary environment where so many other fail… all the while not only retaining, but enhancing, the station’s unique identity and philosophy.

In The Gift (perhaps the single greatest influence on my understanding—such as it is—of art and creativity), Lewis Hyde shares an insight that is at once obvious and profound w/r/t gifts and gift economies: a gift is no such thing unless the recipient can in turn give it away. This characteristic differentiates giving a gift from merely passing something to someone else and also from an exchange or transfer that incurs a debt, even if one that is implicit and possibly protracted.

Implied by this is the necessity of understanding what one has in order to have the ability to share it with someone else. Otherwise it’s like having a (possibly elaborately wrapped and decorated) box with unknown contents. You can hand the box off to someone else, but without knowing what it is you are sharing nothing. And from this we can derive that the knowledge and understanding that I must possess to give a gift must also be present in the recipient else they can’t share it and, again, no gift has been given.

The layers that comprise this simple concept of the gift are, I think, at the heart of the discussions happening about open education, open education resources, and content. In creating content we are creating an essential stuff, but the quest for bringing to this wealth of content a sense of context and process is the transformative activity that makes the content resources shareable at all. There’s no gift economy without gifts, naturally, which means actually giving rather than merely transferring content…

[Gardner Campbell & Jim Groom, OpenEd09]

Day Two of Open Education 2009 and I can honestly say I’ve yet to see a presentation that wasn’t at least as good as the best presentations I’ve seen at any conference anywhere.

Gardner Campbell’s “No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences” is one of those that had me repeatedly saying to myself “every teacher needs to watch this.” In true Gardner-esque fashion—the model I aspire to—he weaved together the invention of the alphabet, Brazil, Shakespeare and the music of the spheres, and much else besides into a (there’s no other word for it) compelling whole.

I came to this conference seeking hope… hope that despite the brokenness of our educational institutions, good teachers can elevate the profession; hope that despite the toll exacted by the daily grind of working within those institutions, excellence can be had. Gardner’s presentation restored some of that hope… his excellent (and funny) analogy to being given a bag of gold is what I need to keep in mind when I return to the other part of my real world.

My question is, how to maintain that hope? Gardner puts forth a premise that we should be teaching using narrative, curation and sharing. We all like to talk about the regressive factors that hold us back: institutional lethargy, recalcitrant educators, simple fear, technological complexity. But worse still is that as much as those factors exist, progress towards this vision of education is impeded by people at the front. Creating narrative is thwarted by concerns about community building and identity. Curation is pushed back by far-leaning constructivists and discovery-based educational theory promoting leading from behind. Efforts at sharing crumble and dissolve beneath the weight of arguments over licensing and which space should be used. Despite the clarity of these three simple concepts—narrate, curate, share—the world feels exceedingly dark.

Gardner used the example of a quotation that feels like it was written yesterday but was actually the words of Marshall McLuhan from over 40 years ago. I’ve used similar examples from the work of Baltasar Gracian (300 years ago) and Michel Montaigne (500 years ago). The wise words grab our attention and confirm our intuitions and desires… but they cut sharply the other way. Go back 40 years, 300 years, 500 years—go back to Plato and Haraklitus—and the relevance of their words also demonstrates clearly how little progress has been made. How do we keep the faith if the answer to that lack of progress is wait, wait, wait, it’s coming, but not yet?

Every session I’ve attended here at Open Ed 2009 has—seriously—been great. I will surely recognize many here specifically in days and weeks to come. But I have to refer you to Alan Levine’s Amazing Stories of Openness without delay because it speaks for itself and should really give you a jolt of electricity, reminding us what this education game is really all about.

The video of the session is great too, because Alan is always engaging and funny. At the end of his presentation he made a comment to the effect that he “didn’t really know what these stories led to.” But that’s the beauty of the shared experiences: they don’t lead to anything. In the same way that we don’t have conversations at a table (or tell stories around a campfire, virtual or not) and wonder where they will lead. Those stories are the destination… those experiences are what it is about.

Following (and during) Dave Cormier’s Open Ed presentation: We Are Not Your %@! Resource:Sustainable Use of Established Communities, Jennifer Jones and I had some Twitter conversation that resulted in her sharing the points shown above.

Community becomes increasingly important as one realizes that open education (if not most education) uses content but involves community. And that was at the heart of Dave’s presentation—conversations about education too often speak about using community and people as if they were content resources.

Jen and I appear to differ in our understanding of community in a way that isn’t uncommon. Let me get the simple agreement out of the way first: I agree completely with her points #1, 2, 4 and 7.

But #3, 5 and 6 get right at our differences in approach. It’s true, though phrased very negatively, that a novel course community is “silo.” But what if it isn’t a silo, but an intentionally short-lived community? I don’t see that any of us belong to “a” community—we belong to many. Our community memberships and affiliations come and go. Some lost a long time, some last for a very short time, maybe only a few days. I not only don’t see a problem with that, I think it’s a positive characteristic of contemporary life… as it has been for as long as people have gathered in groups, but amplified and magnified by the availability of technology that removes some physical limitations to communities we can be part of.

Given that, then lack of sustainability of a course community isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And as I believe that trying on roles and experimenting with positions and philosophies is a critical part of learning, it might sometimes be a highly desirable attribute. Which isn’t to say that I don’t see clearly problematic issues from the simple (resources that are used while part of a community can be desirable long after the community itself no longer is) to the complex (community membership doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game where belonging to community A means withdrawing from—or negatively effects—community B, but it can happen). Learners don’t stop existing in their existing communities when they start existing in those inspired or required as part of an educational experience… a fact that is, in fact, implicit in point 5, which recognizes that learners already exist in multiple communities that co-exist just fine.

Underlying this is also a philosophy of community and education around which Darcy Norman and I were Twitter-debating at the same time: community requirements. If I thought all communities and community engagements operated at the same level, then I could see where requiring participation in a particular community (and thus requiring the same technology) would be much more problematic. But I don’t believe that’s the case. Requiring a student to participate in a particular community is artificial… but time and time again I see what starts as a requirement blossom into an authentic experience that is sustained, either exactly so (when taking part in existing communities outside the class) or in function (when participation in a class community—a flickr group, diigo community, group blog, ning community is continued by students in like form in other places, often using the same tools). This isn’t an unfamiliar practice nor is it limited to community—teaching the arts, for example, often starts with “artificial” assignments which turn out to be precisely what was needed for the learner to become “authentically” engaged.

And requirements—even those that can only be refused at the cost of a grade or whatever mechanism of assessment is being used—aren’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t see requiring participation in a community (constrained, limited, or not) as being any different from other required activities and performances that are part of the teaching and learning process, whether those performances be writing, reading, interviewing, making, building, or what have you.

All that being said, point #7 is very true. When possible/conceivable and desirable—not just technologically, but pedagogically and in light of what I am trying to help students learn, discover, and achieve—taking advantage of the eduglu concept to weave preferred tools and existing communities into the experience is a wonderful thing to do. But I have to push back on the zero-sum approach to community and the idea that "real” (useful, authentic, etc) engagement can’t happen in a constrained and/or required experience.

I like the term open teaching (OpenTeach?) because it helps distinguish one kind of open education goal– provision of open materials (though, as I discussed earlier, that goal can and does stem from widely divergent motivations)– from the necessarily (?) related objective of teaching an open class. Of course an open learner might be taking part in or making use of open materials in any of the three major ways: as a guided learner whose guide is using open materials in a closed course, as a student in an open course, or as an independent learner.

"Open Education" is a vast area with many different territories. "Open Learning" encompasses a diverse group with some strikingly dissimilar needs. An "Open Course" might refer to a list of readings, a "complete" course without instructor, or a guided course. And then at some point a course becomes large enough or guided enough or at least some kind of schedule is suggested and it becomes a "Massively Online Open Course".

Then there are those labels and titles of initiatives that seem to cut various slices of the open education pie: OCW, OER, OpenEd…

It’s a bewildering array of options that makes discussion about accreditation (amongst other topics) difficult because I, at least, am unsure what kind of open education is being discussed at any given time. If "Open Accreditation" is referring to ways in which to confer some kind of material value to the learner who has succeeded in an "Open Teaching" environment, the road to accreditation hacking Shangri-La is a bit less hazy– a slightly smaller step– than providing the same service to the independent learner. The biggest problem is that of assessment. In an open teaching class, there is at least someone who could conceivably perform, facilitate, or coordinate assessment activities… in the independent learning scenario there is no one in that role.