Moving the deckchairs

For Tim Owens and Mike Caulfield

This is a quick post to mark a small turning point. Thanks to the extraordinary patience of Tim Owens at Reclaim Hosting, this blog has shifted to its own domain, and future posts will be coming from musicfordeckchairs.com.

As far as I can tell, subscribers have been transferred but if you have links to the blog, or RSS feeds from here, you’ll need to update them yourself. I’m so sorry if this causes bother.

Staying with wordpress.com for four years helped me learn a ton of simple things. But I’ve been following the development of Jim Groom’s Reclaim Your Domain philosophy from the get-go, and it has always made sense to me, not only as someone who writes in a way that is quite obviously independent from the public communications of my employer, but also as someone who works with students writing in public.

Back in October 2013, Jim wrote a post on his vision for the Reclaim project, that connects the pragmatics of domain ownership to open models of education and learning, to the demands and refusals of agency we all experience as we go about our digital lives. This is where he came down:

To negotiate anything from voting to financial aid to welfare to health care you will need to be web literate. As more and more of these social services go on line, the more we will need to understand how these spaces work, have access and control over this data, and ensure that we’re working to educate the folks who need to know how it works most. I loved that idea, and it abstracted well beyond education. In that regard, reclaim your domain is bigger than that—it is starts to possibly frame a blueprint for a kind of federal digital strategy on an individual basis—something like this has to be coming sooner or later. All of us want some way to start thinking about how we will manage, archive, and share the digital resources we have been creating, collecting, and sharing over the last twenty years, and this will all get more important as time goes on. In many ways this branch of reclaim the most exciting to me.

I was immediately taken with it and planned to join. But about a month later, I found myself dealing with a whole other domain that took me away from this practice for 18 months of illness and recovery. During this time Jim encouraged me nicely to hop across any time I was ready, but for all sorts of reasons I was losing confidence in the ability even to write sentences let alone grasp new things. So I told myself that this level of agency wasn’t for me.

It’s not the coding, but something else: conceptually, I really am a dunce. Spell it out for me, show me on a video, give me a pattern, and I’ll copy the instructions faithfully. In craft terms, I’m a counted cross-stitch gal, with the emphasis on counting.  (Although if you have the slightest interest in what cross-stitch has to do with the internet of things, do take a detour to this lovely student blog post and see what she has done there.)

So something really basic about domain mapping just didn’t click, and I stayed within the realm of the safe and familiar, avoiding the language that seemed to metaphorise onto familiar imagery, until it didn’t. My head was spinning: the digital side of the digital humanities was really failing on the vine for me.

Then earlier this summer, I was given the opportunity to participate with Mike Caulfield, Ward Cunningham and their community of coderati in the Federated Wiki project. From their careful encouragement, I learned how to learn a new skill in an unfamiliar language, and how to understand the skills I have as a writer and bricoleur through a different lens.

If you can make time, the big educational proposition behind the Federated Wiki project is in this extraordinary keynote from November 2014, looping and lacing ideas from Sputnik to Jim Groom to the Kinneavy Triangle to Kate Middleton’s wedding dress.

If you’re in a rush, skip to this:

 I hope this can open up an honest discussion about the ways in which social media is not serving our needs as it currently stands. As advocates we’re so often put in a situation where we have to defend the very idea that social media *is* an information sharing solution that we don’t often get to think about what a better solution for collaboration would look like. Because there are problems with the way social media works now.

My hypothesis is that this federated scheme solves many of the problems. I might be right.

But what I *know* I’m right about is that these problems exist, and they are serious.

Minority voices are squelched, flame wars abound. We spend hours at a time as rats hitting the Skinner-esque levers of Twitter and Tumblr, hoping for new treats — and this might be OK if we actually then built off these things, but we don’t.

We’re stuck in an attention economy feedback loop that doesn’t allow us silent spaces to reflect on issues without news pegs, and in which many of our areas of collaboration have become toxic, or worse, a toxic bureaucracy.

We’re stuck in an attention economy feedback loop where we react to the reactions of reactions (while fearing further reactions), and then we wonder why we’re stuck with groupthink and ideological gridlock.

We’re bigger than this and we can envision new systems that acknowledge that bigness.

This.

I entered the Federated Wiki experiment as a writer, and came out a better writer, because I learned how to use technical connectivity as a light trapeze from one idea to another. Federated Wiki isn’t for everyone, and it’s certainly got a face for radio at the moment, but my experience has been that there are very sophisticated values behind it that have something to do with how we’ll learn in the future.

So now, thanks to all the human patience and technical encouragement of people like Tim and Mike, and Audrey who said “just do it”, I’m pinning a note on the door of this blog to say that everything is just over there. 

Sightings

Updates below

In a bizarre coincidence, when I opened the book to scan the contents I found myself looking at the section about sharks.  In particular, “surviving if you are in a raft and you sight sharks—”… I wonder if anyone would be interested in using this as a model for an edtech field manual for surviving the Higher Ed apocalypse.

Jim Groom,”Survival: the manual” July 7 2014

Thanks to Jim Groom, I’ve been thinking about Jaws in this plainly bizarre week in the short history of commercial MOOCs. For all its singular qualities, and for all the symbolic load placed on it by film theorists, Jaws is at heart an ordinary mystery: something unexpected and unexplained happens, someone goes missing, and everyone else spends the movie piecing together clues, disputing priorities, and dealing with what comes next.

But there’s a small scene in the middle that often gets forgotten, where two kids prank the holiday crowds at the beach with a cardboard fin—and in doing this set up the perfect opportunity for the real shark to glide in to calm water, unnoticed by everyone until it’s too late.

This week’s edtech weirdness had both mystery and something like a distracting prank, involving a MOOC in which the professor was yanked from view, then bobbed up again briefly, before vanishing again. Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a maths lecturer from the University of Zurich, put up a three-week course: “Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required” (#massiveteaching) through Coursera. The landing pages raise questions about the Coursera approval pathway and standards: two weeks of short RSA Animate style videos, and a final week where students will do more or less whatever they like in an “Experiment Area”. Dehaye is likeable, clear and thoughtful about his topic, but the videos aren’t elite brand rocket science—certainly, nothing that an informed and curious teacher in the office next door to you couldn’t have thought up.

And that should have been the first clue, I think. The course goal is “personal growth”, for which—thankfully—no certificate is offered, and the content is quite vague: “‘Readings’ will come naturally during the course as basis for discussion. … In the first week, we will provide a short summary of proposed content of the course. The content of the later weeks will be decided on by the students, and should cover the proposed content and more.”

But after the first week some or all of the content was deleted, and then Dehaye was himself removed, leaving enigmatic clues on Twitter, some participation in Metafilter discussions, some blog comments here and there (including on George Siemens’ blog), and a deleted Etherpad document that he wrote to explain his actions.

MOOCs can be used to enhance privacy, or really destroy it. I am in a real bind. I want to fight scientifically for the idea, yet teach, and I have signed contracts, which no one asks me about. If you ask me something, I can tell you where to look for the information. My plan becomes to flip the tables. I want to “break out” and forge an identity outside of the course, on Twitter, because I realize this is the only way for me to fight for this identity, engage with my students, and those big shots all simultaneously (journalists, educational analytics people, etc).  … Meanwhile I want everyone to organize their own learning, which I know is happening by looking a bit around. Some people don’t like my course, which is fine. It’s your choice, that’s part of the point. Still, I get lots of emails from coursera asking what is going on. A lot of pressure from them now. They are confused just like you were, and I intended to confuse them even more because they were not ready to challenge their own pedagogical practices fast enough, judging from past experience.

After blogger Apostolos K pointed out that these strange goings-on hadn’t attracted much coverage, and George Siemens wrote “Something Weird is Happening at Coursera“, the story was quickly picked up. Carl Straumsheim treated it as “The Mystery of the Missing MOOC” for Inside Higher Ed; Steve Kolowich covered it for The Chronicle first as a mystery (“In a MOOC Mystery, a Course Suddenly Vanishes“) and then as an experiment (“University of Zurich Says Professor Deleted MOOC to Raise Student Engagement“). Jonathan Rees had two goes at it, both worth reading: “The worst of the best of the best” on his own blog, and “Even super professors deserve academic freedom” for The Academe Blog. Rolin Moe, whose MOOC blog is touchingly subtitled “Debating, debriefing and defining the learning trend of 2012-“, wrote it up as “Dr Famous is Missing“.

By the end of the week, opinions diverged. Yesterday Michael Gallagher argued in a beautiful post that to exploit students in a research project raises questions of trust that can’t be overlooked even if the intent is to criticise (“Teaching vs. research and MOOC brouhahas“); today George Siemens congratulated Dehaye on starting a conversation about our vulnerability to commercial data mining by companies like Coursera.

I’m still absorbed by the freakishly odd coincidence of Dehaye’s co-authored take on a probability problem that’s apparently well known to mathematicians, involving 100 Prisoners And A Lightbulb, with George Siemens’ July 5 post (published just before all this turned into a thing) on the latent knowledge in any class, involving 100 learners in a room. This is Siemens, but could be Dehaye:

The knowledge and creative capacity of any class is stunning. Unfortunately, this knowledge is latent as the system has been architected, much like a dictatorship, to give control to one person. In many cases, students have become so accustomed to being “taught” that they are often unable, at first, to share their knowledge capacity. This is an experience that I have had in every MOOC that I’ve taught. The emphasis in MOOCs that I’ve been involved with is always on learners taking control, learners joining a network, or learners becoming creators. In a Pavolovian sense, many learners find this process disorienting and uninviting. We have been taught, after a decade+ of formal schooling, to behave and act a certain way. When someone encourages a departure from those methods, the first response is confusion, distrust or reluctance.

I’ll call my theory of knowledge and learning “100 people in a room”. If we put 100 people in a room, the latent knowledge capacity of that room in enormous. Everyone in this room has different life experiences, hobbies, interests, and knowledge. We could teach each other math, physics, calculus. We could teach poetry, different languages, and political theory. The knowledge is there, but it is disconnected and latent. Much of that knowledge is latent for two reasons: 1) We don’t know what others know, 2) connections aren’t made because we are not able with our current technologies to enable everyone to speak and be heard.

At the moment, I’m not sure that we know enough to be sure what the plan was with #massiveteaching. So I’m keeping an open mind to the possibility that what looked like a prank was an attempt to start a different conversation—including, and perhaps especially, with students—about the risks of corporate data mining and the lessons from Google advertisements or Facebook’s experiments with emotional manipulation. The fact that it didn’t work smoothly, and might make Coursera much more twitchy about allowing experimental course design in the future, shouldn’t necessarily be the measure by which it’s finally judged.

Meanwhile let’s keep one eye on the ocean where the real sharks are. As ever, the timely counsel in confusing times is from Jim Groom, who seems to me to be looking in the right direction:

I don’t know what it is, but Sharks remind me we are deeply vulnerable always.

Me too.

Update

People are still writing about this. Two very good posts today:

• Update from Apostolos K: “You’ve Been Punk’d, However That Was an Educational Experience“
• Reflection from Maha Bali: “On Subversion“

According to Apostolos K, Coursera/U Zurich have resumed the course without Paul-Olivier Dehaye, which seems to me a reasonably complicated thing to do if the whole designed purpose of the enterprise originates with him. It’s a bit like the Mayor of Amity Island putting on the cardboard fin to prove that there’s no shark.

The revolution might be televised

The first time I watched the awful EPIC2020 videos I was so irked by everything about them that I never went back to look carefully at the details of their campaign to reform higher education. But now I have, and I’m beyond irked. I’ve been boosted into the realm of appalled fascination. They’re going to “shatter the paradigm that the future will be anything like the past as well as facilitate discussion and accelerate actions to bring about the transformation of the education of the world.” I can’t look away.

So now I know that EPIC stands for “The Evolving Personal Information Construct”, a kind of analytics-driven micromanagement of all aspects of our lives, monitoring and continuously improving our social and emotional networks, our physical health, and our career prospects. Happily, though, the EPIC dashboard will never give me information I cannot immediately understand, because it “will know everything that you know and understand everything that you need to know to optimize your life. EPIC will connect you with everything and everyone that is important to your success.”

Normally at this point, you’d be tiptoeing backwards out of the room. But what EPIC2020 are saying about the need for revolution in higher education is suddenly appearing all over the place; there’s a line up of people waiting to throw rocks at the very idea that stability in publically funded institutions could be a sign of responsible, capable governance.

So, reluctantly, I’m taking their crazy big picture thinking more seriously than it deserves, because they’re right on two points. The sudden partnership between venture-funded educational startups and traditional elite universities has thrown down a big challenge to less flexible models of higher education, especially outside the US. And the fact that we’ve typically bundled content, learning and accreditation under the broad heading “education” doesn’t mean that we’ll be able to keep them all contained in this way indefinitely.

What happens if we untangle them, and allow content production (and the consequent advantages of content ownership) to rest with those institutions that can afford the highest quality production values? Robert Bruner, Dean of the Darden School of Business at UVa, is one of the few to be candid about the costs involved:

The production of an online course is rapidly moving beyond the use of a stationary video recorder capturing a professor in a lecture hall. It is already clear that there is an arm’s race on the basis of quality. Look for three camera shoots and creative directors coming to campuses soon. You’ll need scripts, a production crew, interactive capabilities, and a sound studio.

Australia knows a thing or two about being left behind in the cinematic arms race; global free trade in media content has been an uneven experience for us. So we can see the risk to locally relevant educational content in this model. It will always be cheaper for us to import than to produce, just as it is for television. If we think education is a culturally significant environment, whose future lies in media production and broadcast rather than personal delivery, then protecting content diversity will become an urgent political priority in the education portfolio. We will need imaginative funding strategies and smart transnational partnerships to help local educational content stay viable, just as we do with transnational co-production treaties in film and television production.

I was thinking about all this because I’ve finally signed up to a Coursera MOOC.  I did it partly because there’s a short course that interests me, led by someone I’m curious to know more about—but mostly because I want to know how it feels to be part of this borderless, classless, cashless education revolution.

In one way, I loved the zany spontaneity of it all. I didn’t have to fill out any forms, or find any of my professional paperwork, or fish out my credit card or even my PayPal password.  Two or three clicks, and I’m in. Of course, there’s some small print in their terms of service. It’s mostly unexceptional stuff about copyright, and something called the Coursera Honor Code, which asks me not to sign up with more than one account—presumably because that will stuff the analytics.

In fact, the integrity of my singular identity is something they’re going to want to be sure of, because they’re reserving the right to do quite a bit with identifying data about me, particularly in relation to third parties and contractors. They’re also helping themselves to “fully transferable, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free and non-exclusive license” to use any content I might generate or upload, although my use of their content is significantly more restricted.

But still, it’s free.  And so I wanted to know how this works for either the university involved, or the platform service provider. Jim Groom’s excellent post on the mysteries of the Coursera business model sent me rummaging through Jeff Young’s coverage for The Chronicle to the 42 page contract between Coursera and the University of Michigan. It looks like they can afford a wait-and-see approach, because if this succeeds, it’s going to succeed on a huge scale: mass education is an emerging media market everyone wants a piece of.

So here’s their fairly open-ended plan: among their eight potential strategies, listed as Schedule 1 to the contract, they reserve the opportunity to offer human teaching and grading services together with secure assessment facilities, and they might charge tuition. (To anyone working at a university, these horizons of possibility could ring a few bells.) They’re also looking into passing on student details to recruiters, and may undertake some employee screening and training themselves. And if that doesn’t bring it home, they’re also prepared to sell university-branded certificates “to the end user”. In other words, they’re not proposing entirely revolutionary ideas, so much as pushing public education onto a profitable, commercial footing.

And it’s when they say that they’re open to selling their audience to advertisers, via “appropriate and non-intrusive visual elements on the Course webpage”, that things start to feel really familiar. Put this together with course content that’s made up of “60% recorded lectures and 40% videoed interviews”, which amounts to 100% stuff to watch, and the basic model here isn’t education at all.  It’s television.

So while I still think the person involved is someone I’d want to watch on TV, with 32,963 students currently enrolled, I’m not sure whether I joined a class or sat down on the couch.  Let’s see.