And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out? They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out? And friends they may think it’s a movement.
And that’s what it is , the Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come’s around on the guitar.
With feeling.
-Arlo Guthrie
My post on Jim Groom’s DS 106 MOOC generated a lot of discussion, both in the comments thread and on other blogs. However, I would like to see it also generate action, which is always one of my goals as an edublogger. At one point in the comments thread, I wrote,
My main concern is that we keep our eye on the ball. What kinds of problems can the techniques behind ds106 (for example) solve for which people? Who can they help in what ways? Who do we not yet know how to help using the current techniques of open education? How can we stretch what we are learning from ds1-6 and other experiments to reach other people and solve other problems? In particular, while I hear a lot of talk from open education proponents about democratization, most of the experiments around MOOCs and the like seem to take as students mostly…well…people who are blogging about how great MOOCs could be. There’s nothing wrong with that if the purpose is to learn how to do better MOOCs, or if the goal is just personal fulfillment, but it’s not clear to me how these translate into broad educational success that is “rhizomatic” for people who haven’t already gone to (conventional, industrialized) graduate school to learn what “rhizomatic” means. Yes, there are some great success stories from Jim’s class, and I’m sure, from other MOOCs, about people who didn’t come in as ed tech gurus and were lifted up by the course, inspired to better their lives. But you can tell the same kind of stories of people who come through conventional classrooms. What I want to see is that those successes aren’t accidental to the model. I want to see that the MOOC can be tuned to reach people who haven’t graduated college or even gone to college. When I say I want to see that, I’m not expressing skepticism. What I mean is that I want to see it.
Today, I am going to make my contribution to that goal by proposing a campaign to scale out MOOC adoption in order to reach many more and different people.
A Rose by Any Other Name…
There is a wide range of experimentation in open educational experiences, so before I go any further, I should explain what I mean here. Let’s start with the term “MOOC.” I don’t like it.1 I don’t think it reflects what is essentially interesting or useful about the movement. As far as I can tell, the term “Massively Open Online Course” is derived from “Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games” (MMORPGs). First of all, I see no evidence that the idea of achieving scale by getting many, many people into one class is a particularly effective means of scaling. More importantly, I don’t see that massiveness is essential to the idea underlying the various experiments that people are calling MOOCs. The essential characteristic, in my view, is “open.” And “massive” is not the right modifier for “open.” Rather, I would say they are “radically open,” in the sense that all content is freely accessible and anyone can come and do however much or little as they want, when they want, and leave when they want. This lack of accountability and follow-through is sometimes criticized as a bug, but actually it’s a feature. In fact, it is the essential defining characteristic. The very thing that makes a course like DS 106 work is the fact that people make it into what they need it to be. It is a Radically Open Online Class, or ROOC.
But that’s not quite right either. The experiments that we recognize as MOOCs or ROOCs have typically been class-like, but I think that’s mostly an accident of history. They don’t need to have a teacher, be associated with a university, or be limited in time to the length of a semester. In fact, time is one of the more interesting dimensions to play with in ROOCs. On the one extreme, a ROOC could be completely unbounded—essentially a community of interest in which people give themselves assignments. Consider the 365 project, where people voluntarily take a picture a day for a year and share them to learn about photography and themselves. People start whenever they want. They can participate for a year, but they also can participate for a day or for ten years. They can take pictures every day religiously, or they can skip if they want to. There are educational activities taking place within a minimally social context, but that’s about the extent of it’s class-like characteristics. On the other end of the duration spectrum, you have something like the 11eleven project, where people contribute pictures, video, or sound recordings to a collection from which will be stitched together a two-hour movie of what happened in the world on 11-11-11. It’s a one-day event—almost an educational flash mob. For that matter, I don’t think these things even need to be online. I would think that an unconference is pretty much in the same spirit of the things we call “MOOCs.”
In short, what we are talking about (or, at least, what I am talking about) is Radically Open Education, or ROE, which is a modifier for a kind of event. You can have a ROE class, a ROE flash mob (virtual or physical), a ROE community, or a ROE conference. The essential characteristic of ROE is that it increases access to all kinds of voluntary learning experiences. The motto of all things ROE could be “Practice Random Acts of Learning.” There will still exist a thing called a MOOC that is defined by historical practice, but as such it is simply one genre of ROE. I don’t care about MOOCs; I care about ROE.
The Big Idea
Now, we want to massively scale our radically open education. We want to offer many, many people lots of opportunities to practice random acts of learning. We want to get the whole world addicted to enlightenment. I’m talking about Free as in “The first one’s for free, kid.” And we want particularly to hook those people who most need to be hooked—the people who have not had good educations and have not been empowered.
Where can we start to get that kind of scale?
How about at…uh…you know…school? Schools have lots of smart people who are interested in learning about all kinds of things and committed to the idea of helping other people learn all kinds of interesting things. I’m talking about the community in a school. The people. Specifically, I’m talking about a school as a community of interest. We can harness that intention.
But we can also harness the institution. Every organization, culture, or institution develops its own set of survival reflexes. It begins to exist for its own sake and act to preserve that existence. We may sometimes feel like that is the tail wagging the dog, but in this case we can harness that impulse and the energy behind it.
Here’s what we do:
Every college “wants” to recruit students. That’s part of the of institutional survival instinct. How do schools do this? Lots of ways, but a big part of it is making prospective students feel like they have personal connections, and that the college experience will be fun for them. That’s why it’s not terribly uncommon for schools to put on educational events as recruiting tools. When my alma mater was trying to recruit students into the honors program, they brought prospects on campus for mini-lectures by a couple of the most entertaining and fascinating professors and then did a meet-and-greet afterward. A ROE online class could help create exactly the kinds of connection and positive associations that these recruitment events are trying to foster. What I propose is a kit for building ROE classes to be run by community colleges that are aimed at creating fun online educational experiences for high school students. A recruitment MOOC in a box. Professors and students alike could create lessons and assignments that are freely available for the high school students to participate in—or not. This could be coupled with some in-person outreach to the high schools (which potentially means grant money for the colleges). Because it is ROE, you can sustain such a class/community with small contributions from many college teachers and students, who participate as much as they would like, plus probably some sustained effort by one or several people. The institution will see this as a recruitment effort, which is fine but beside the point. The ROE class wouldn’t just be recruiting students for higher education; it would actually be educating them. Some of them might choose to continue by enrolling in college, which would be great. But wherever the students go next, the main point would be to get them addicted to learning.
Around this ROE kit, you’d probably want to create a ROE meta-community comprised of the people who are most involved in the nuts and bolts of running the program on the campuses. This could be structured very much like DS 106, where the participants are learning the technology skills they need to create meaningful online experiences, but it would also be a forum for sharing ideas for the respective college-hosted ROE communities.
This is something that could be done affordably and sustainably at every community college in the United States. I strongly suspect it could increase high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates, and even college achievement for a huge and underserved population. All of which would be icing on the cake. The main thing is, people would be learning.
On Language
I want to focus this post on goals and actions rather than academic debate, but since there has been so much discussion of the value of academic language in general and of the term “rhizomatic” in particular, I feel compelled to address the question of language. I am neither anti-intellectual nor anti-Latinate. Complex words have their place. But there are several reasons why I think they should be used sparingly in this context. First of all, if we are talking about the democratization of learning, then using academic language strikes me as antithetical to that intention.2 During the Protestant Reformation, one of the first things the reformers did to democratize their religion was get rid of Latin in the service. If you want to get all neo-Marxist, Poststructuralist, or post-neo-whateveralist, you could say that the language of academia is itself an architecture of control. People shouldn’t have to learn both botany and social criticism in order to have a conversation about why ROE has value to them.
Second, wrapping this work in ideologically charged language unnecessarily makes enemies and scares away potential friends. This need not be ideological. Learning is Good. More learning is Gooder. Nobody should object to creating opportunities for everybody to be both a teacher and a learner at all times. The first rule of fight club is don’t talk about fight club.
Huh….isn’t rhizomatic a Gillette razor or something? Snarkiness aside, and the fact that Deleuze and many others of that particular intellectual tradition have seemed impenetrable (anti-democratic?) to me, the language those theorists have used, and inculcated in followers, have sometimes led to really valuable and approachable ways of understanding technology and what it’s doing to us. Or so anyway argues Steven Johnson (author of Everything Bad is Good For You) in the following New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/books/review/i-was-an-under-age-semiotician.html?pagewanted=all
In a slightly different vein couldn’t it be said that all language is ideological? The heavy use of acronyms among technologists, our preference for words like “disruptive innovation” and maybe even the choice to use a language like Java instead of, say, php can be construed as ideological — at least in the sense that there’s an “architecture of control” that those languages are serving to legitimate or call into question. I think what I’m trying to say is that a word like ideology shouldn’t necessarily be construed as pejorative especially in it’s most benign sense. In the university it’s our business to talk about ideas — in so far as it is we shouldn’t shirk talking about ideology.
Luke, you and I see eye-to-eye on lots of things, and I always appreciate the insight and nuance you bring to discussions. But surely you can see that sometimes it is less important to be nuanced and intellectually limber than it is to be effective…?
Regarding the Steven Johnson piece, if traditional, largely privileged undergraduates at Brown University feel empowered by studying Derrida, more power to ’em. But to make the argument that obscure academic language is empowering in the context of this post is perverse.
This is the essential frustration for me in this conversation, and it is frankly one of the reasons why I couldn’t stay in academia. I want to talk about empowering real human beings. I believe that experiments in open education are heartfelt—and important—efforts to do that. And yet, when I try to start a conversation about how to make them more effective and more broadly applicable, what I get back is theory talk. Yeah, absolutely, it’s a university’s business to talk about ideas. But right here at this moment, I’m not talking about a university’s business. I’m talking specifically about providing broad opportunities for people who did not grow up in families that send their kids to Brown to experience the empowerment that comes when the metaphorical light bulb goes on. And to the extent that we share that goal, shouldn’t we be talking about empowerment in language that is immediately accessible to the people that we are trying to help empower themselves? If similar issues exist with technology and tech language, by all means, let’s knock ’em down. I’m a big fan of the Chisimba project, which is an LMS built by Africans for Africans, driven by the idea that educating people to be competent to build their own learning environment is at least as important as providing them with a free one. Whatever it takes.
Regarding the point that everything is ideological, once again, yeah, that’s an interesting conversation to have. But it’s also not what I meant by “ideological” and mostly beside the point anyway. If you’re trying to inspire people to do more to create educational activities, why pick enemies? Couching the effort in language that is both anti-establishment and (ironically) elitist seems completely counter-productive. Again, this isn’t a blanket statement about the general value of critique, whether academic or political. I don’t have a problem with challenging the establishment. I have participated in my local Occupy protests ,and I have participated in protests long before there was a local Occupy. I would like to think that I have challenged the establishment on this blog from time to time, occasionally with some impact. But I don’t see how couching open education as a resistance movement accomplishes anything.
I don’t want to get into a debate about the nature of ideology. I want to figure out what words and actions are effective in creating positive change. If I am forced to choose an ideology here, I will say that I am a militant utilitarian.
> I don’t care about MOOCs; I care about ROE.
In the same spirit, I would say I care about ‘free learning’, which is the terminology I’ve been using for several years to describe the open approach that characterizes everything from MOOCs, my website and newsletter, open conferences, open archives, and OERs.
Instead of the opacity of Deleuze and others of that tradition, who have really been of no influence on me nor probably Siemens (nor probably until fairly recently Dave Cormier), you can opt for the opacity of, um, Downes, with my work on Free Learning. http://www.downes.ca/me/mybooks.htm Not to toot my own horn, but it seems sort of silly to focus on Deleuze when there is so much *actual* foundational material available in clear non-specific language.
As for whether the model will scale, I think it is already scaling; we had a total of maybe four MOOCs before 2011, this year alone there’s something like a dozen, and by next year the original form will be unrecognizable in the proliferation of different projects and approaches. All of which is good, from my perspective, as what these approaches have in common is that they promote free learning.
Where they will differ, I think, is not only methodology, but in how or why they scale. I think the model here is better than, say, a TED-like model, insofar as the model proposed here would promote actual learning, deep learning from authentic sources, rather than homogenized glossy non-challenging learning by TV-pretty presenters. But, as I said, we’ll get a wide range of models, and I’m not so confident organizations run by professors will compete well with organizations run by advertising executives. But I’m hoping I’m wrong.
Hi Michael
I’m really interested in the ROOC-in-a-box model for recruitment and engagement, but I do also think this way of passing on college-built material into informal learning is achievable now, with open resources. Colleges are doing it. Coming from the other direction there are also multiple and long-standing models of the radically unbounded ROOC practices in online communities of all sorts, that build persistent social networks, share resources, and eventually start to build their own resources, including community-generated publications. As you say, TED.
So I feel a little like I did when I read Dave Cormier’s rhizomatic grading models: we already do so much of this, I can’t see so clearly what we’re changing.
Maybe it comes down to the showdown between open or self-managed learning and formal college credit? So I’m interested in how you see this working out, as it seems to me this is what will ultimately determine the future of the global market for post-secondary education. If we move beyond the idea of college experience as being essential to learning, we’re left with college as accrediting body, and there are many people arguing that this could be done more efficiently, leaving the actual practice of learning to a wider range of environments, with scaled fee structures to enable much wider kinds of participation.
But it does leave traditional colleges in something of a passport stamping role. And it does require strong commitment from employers to value learning achieved in the open.
Kate, I have no idea how all this works out. I’m not at all convinced that it is knowable at this point. And I suspect that systemic reform rarely, if ever, happens in a way that was carefully designed in advance. My focus is on taking steps that will improve opportunities and outcomes for large groups of people, regardless of whether those steps are revolutionary or evolutionary. Providing informal education channels for underserved high school students strikes me as a logical place to start.
That said, to the degree that systemic educational reform is possible, it has to start with demand from the students. The best outcome would be for young people to demand the education that they need. If you want to foster that kind of pressure for change, you have to start by raising their expectations for educational experience. The joy that they can get out of self-directed informal learning could help to do that.
Raising people’s expectations for education: that’s so exciting, and one of the best articulations of a goal for radical educators I’ve seen. So what you’re suggesting is that introducing ‘open’ early (in high school, say) would in itself begin to reform formal education by changing the way in which students are primed to expect openness? But this could happen at any stage, really. If the standards for participation, content, and engagement are set in the open, then traditional accrediting institutions will have to keep up.
In some ways, what has already started to happen in the LMS market mirrors this. For a long time, unengaging design was a kind of norm, but students are now entering formal education having been on highly engaging social media platforms all their lives. They take a look at the standard be-all LMS as an environment for social learning, where they discover that personalisation is limited to the odd background colour change, and online presence, status updates, personal photostreams, RSS feeds to their public cloud social media, etc are all fairly difficult, and they say: is that it? But the process of updating LMS design has been surprisingly slow, so I would imagine that traditional institutions would move at a similar pace, unless their market was seriously at risk.
But I still like the idea.
It isn’t even about getting students to demand education that is more open so much as it is getting them to demand education that is more engaging. If they find something that they choose to do in a ROE class, it is engaging by definition. There would be no other reason for them to do it. There are many places and ways you can do this. I just suggest community college recruitment because schools are motivated to do outreach there, and you could drive fast adoption of ROE in a way that doesn’t appear to threaten their core instructional model.
Leaving the language and ideology questions aside I was wondering whether you think the Baumol Effect (which was highlighted at at least one Educause 2011 presentation — also summarized at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease) sheds any light on the scaling questions you are posing. As I understand it, if the Baumol effect applies, than there aren’t a lot more efficiencies that we can extract from the education industry. And if we do manage to teach more students with fewer teachers we’re probably doing it in a way that sacrifices quality.
What we may find attractive in Jim Groom’s courses (and others) is that he seems to be getting around the Baumol effect. Scaling and efficiency may be improving, but it’s happening in a way that isn’t undermining quality or the essential “humanness” of student-teacher interaction. But is what Groom is doing something that can be taken up by anybody but a minority of instructors? Or are our efforts to promote it also a way of sugar-coating the industrialization and automation of higher education to faculty (like the late David Noble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_F._Noble ) who are pretty sure that education really is subject to Baumol’s cost disease?
Hi Michael,
Saying that you are not ‘anti-intellectual’ doesn’t make it so… I can never seem to get my mind around things like “First of all, if we are talking about the democratization of learning, then using academic language strikes me as antithetical to that intention.”
I need not learn someone else’s language in order to learn anything about learning.
Michael. The whole reason we use more language, new metaphors, other stories… because the rhizome is a story is to try and share our experience. Deleuze and Guattari were trying to imagine a new framework… that’s hard. I tried to make their crazy framework accessible. I am CONSTANTLY trying to make that more accessible, because i think the ideas are important.
This “If you want to get all neo-Marxist, Poststructuralist, or post-neo-whateveralist, you could say that the language of academia is itself an architecture of control.” is anti-intellectual.
I tried to tell a story last week. You read it as exclusion. In the process of exclusion, one or the other (or both of us) is excluding the other. This language excludes me… at what point did i exclude you?
Funny, because we agree about all the points about massiveness and focus on emancipation… which is what most of us have been saying all along. my http://xpu.ca project is a reasonable example.
Do you have any advice on how to make my position clearer?
Luke, on the question of Baumol’s Disease, I think the answer is yes and no. On the one hand, I’m not sure that Jim is really teaching DS 106 anymore. To his credit, he has created a self-sustaining system in which students teach themselves and others. That’s not to say that Jim doesn’t have a significant impact through his facilitation and participation, but the point is that the structure of the course is such that it doesn’t require a pedagogical genius to get up and running. On the other hand, I don’t think there is a good case to be made yet for the idea that ROE classes in their current incarnation can displace traditional classes. For the moment, they serve different purposes.
Dave, you seem to have a pretty narrow definition of an intellectual. Isn’t it possible to both celebrate the life of the mind and believe that modern critical theory is largely a bankrupt intellectual endeavor? More importantly, isn’t it plausible that somebody can both appreciate the need and value of complex ideas while also questioning whether a particular complexity is truly necessary or helpful for solving a practical problem?
You have cast this debate as being about me excluding you or you excluding me. I say that misses the point. Neither one of us is excluded. Not really. We both are educationally privileged. Your talking about Deleuze doesn’t exclude me. I could see your Deleuze and raise you a Bourdeiu if wanted to play. But who are we studying educational reform for? Who are we trying to help? Are they in this conversation with us? If not, why not?
Once again, this is my core frustration with the conversation. My post was primarily about a proposed course of action that would test whether radically open educational techniques that you have pioneered (a) can be used effectively to reach economically and academically disadvantaged high school students, and (b) can be woven into the fabric of how a university defines its presence and impact in a community. I was hoping that I would get comments back like, “Great, I’m ready to do this at my institution” or “That will never work because…” or “If you really want it to fly, you have to tweak it in the following way…” or “Well, that could work, but I think it’s a bad idea because….” Instead, everybody seems to want to talk about the parenthetical about language that I tacked onto the end. Worse, the concerns are that undergraduates at Brown might lose the opportunity to savor a deliciously difficult Derridian koan or that a professor might feel excluded because he can’t use his theoretical construct of choice. Why are we doing this work? What is it in the service of? Is this intellectualism purely for its own sake, or are we trying to accomplish something else?
I was a philosophy major and an English PhD student. I started reading Plato and Aristotle and Kant when I was twelve years old. I like theory. I value deep questions. But I don’t conflate those activities with reform activism. One can inform the other, but that isn’t necessarily the case, and the activities themselves for achieving these two goals are very different. My father likes to say, “I was an economics major in college. I’m still poor but now I know why.” There’s nothing wrong with being an economist, but let’s not conflate debating the finer points of monetary theory with solving the global poverty problem.
I say again…
http://xpu.ca
For disadvantaged students. Inside academia.
and no… you can’t claim that the epistemic premise of a significant chunk of the intellectual world is ‘bankrupt’ and not be anti-intellectual. That’s what anti-intellectual is… presuming the people you don’t agree with are “just wrong”.
I presume? Or I conclude? It is anti-intellectual to come to conclusions about the value of a theoretical school of thought? I thought that’s what intellectualism is. If you say that anyone who rejects a premise (epistemic or otherwise) of a significant chunk of the intellectual world is necessarily an anti-intellectual, then every intellectual is also an anti-intellectual. Was Bertrand Russell an anti-intellectual? Was Quine an anti-intellectual? When you accept one school of philosophical thought, you reject another. Necessarily. I do not believe that one has to surrender one’s views of what is true in the world—and what is not—in order to be an intellectual.
But again, that’s mostly beside the point. At the end of the day, I mostly don’t care whether you use “rhizomatic” or any other terminology that you choose. This is not personal for me, except in the sense that I feel a personal responsibility to try and promote a reform agenda. To the degree that the language that we use to describe reform goals or rationale become a barrier to enlisting people to the cause, I will have some skin in the game. But only to that degree. I may not have a high opinion of Continental critical theory, but that’s neither here nor there. The main point, for me, is the doing.
I am not in a place where I can look at Experience U at the moment, but I’ll spend some time with it when I get home over the weekend.
I’m really persuaded by Experience U–this evening I even ended up watching its videos on YouTube, that’s how drawn in I was. I think it’s exactly the kind of practical initiative that Michael is talking about. The video I watched with Dave welcoming the students to the first week had such an engaging, straightforward use of language and interface that it would have our (similarly often disadvantaged) students lining up to participate.
This is the thing: the practicalities don’t seem to me to be at risk even if we also find some complex metaphors persuasive, or slightly persuasive, in trying to think about educational innovation. In my case, I find the rhizome fully persuasive of something that’s less than fully good, which might be where I slightly part company with Dave–but I do find that the metaphor itself has helped me think, in this case how decentred practices can in themselves be a mask for power. Could I have got there without the rhizome? Yup, slowly. Could I have got there without Deleuze, and just with Dave? Yup. But that said, going back to Deleuze released a whole cloud of other ideas that really helped me think.
I think this is a rare win-win situation so we might as well celebrate: the serious, political, practical interventions of which Experience U. seems to me a fantastic example, can co-exist with all sorts of different ways of reflecting on them.
That’s my 2c worth, in Australian currency.
Kate
Thanks for this posting Michael. I like the concepts you’re putting forward here. I like the ‘roll your sleeves up’ and get on with it approach to actually making a difference, without getting bogged down in the academic discussions. I’m in agreement with your comments about MOOCs, particularly the point that unconferences fall into this bucket and MOOC is probably the wrong term to use but currently has currency. I think I’d like to work with your ideas, ‘roll my sleeves up’ and put something together. I’ll see where I get.