In the final week of the #OpenEdMOOC, I learned some connections that I had not been aware of: How openness is also related to learning analytics and algorithms. I had been familiar with the idea that algorithms must be transparent (mainly via K. Zweig and her algorithmwatch.org) and I participated in the ‘data donation’ that took place before our federal election in September and attempted to get this transparency. But I had not thought about how companies would be tempted to abuse student data when they are trying to sell their ‘secret sauce’ of learning — although I had been skeptical against such recipes before. At least now, this MOOC paid off for me, and it was the first one after a long time that I did not drop out before the last week. So I want to share what I noticed about my own learning and motivation and reluctance. There were elements that motivated me to reflect and engage, and there were elements that put me off. The latter ones often included a task, or an objective, or the big final project, and I was surprised about myself how often the edX platform with its rigid goal-directed framing, increased my reluctance to ‘obey’. For example, the ‘prompts’, the ‘due dates’, the ‘next’ button, the ‘activities’, and in particular the size of the ‘project’: a 1 hour lesson. (I did not mind writing the three little essays in CCK08 despite I was not a for-credit learner because this felt like just the right size for voluntary engagement.) I don’t doubt that such tight pacing, or ‘lock-step’ walkthrough, across a wide field of content might be useful for some at-risk learners. But I think many adult learners do not like such a tight prescriptive style, and for workplace learning such formal structures are even more unpopular. But even worse: I noticed that for me, such MOOC ‘objectives’ (“Detail how…”, “Describe how…”) actually inhibit reflections in the sense of: What struck me as susprising or salient or resonating?. Because, for the latter, a ‘broad vigilant attention’ is needed (sorry for borrowing once again from McGilchrist), while the guiding objectives switch off this kind of attention and turn over to a ‘narrow focus’ kind of attention, to follow the tip of the teacher’s pointer stick, so to speak. So, the well-meant suggestions for ‘activity’ may just put off from reflective activity — and maybe this is why reflecting is so unpopular among pressed students? Image: adapted from Distant Shores Media/Sweet Publishing (under CC-BY-SA) and Rodin (Public Domain). Filed under: OpenEdMOOC

Week 5 of #OpenEdMOOC is about “Research on OER Impact and Effectiveness”. Certainly, OER adoption would somewhat increase if this research could prove that OERs do function equally well as commercial textbooks. To prove this, the research would have to copy the goals and measures from the traditional expectations that people have. I think there is a danger, then, that such expectations focus too much on how easily stuff can be ingested — a Nuremberg Funnel would be the ideal exchange value for the many dollars of a commercial textbook, wouldn’t it? But such a measure of effectiveness would be questionable. In my own discipline, math, we have the saying: “A king’s road to mathematics does not exist.” There are, instead, two completely different goals. One is to learn how to apply the rules for the necessary calculations that you may have to carry out in later life. The other one is to learn mathematical thinking. If you focus on making the former as easy as possible (which is a legitimate goal), it is less probable that mathematical thinking emerges. For example, if you always have perfect pictures, visualisations and simulations in your textbook media, you will memorize the concepts and procedures quicker, but you won’t develop the ability to visualize difficult relationships on your own, i.e., if the abstract is made less abstract for you, you won’t learn from it how to cope with new abstract things. To repeat an older metaphor: If we compare learning to carrying a load upstairs to the attic storage, there are two distinct goals. One is that the load should be stored up there, and the other is to work out one’s muscles. If it is only necessary that the stuff is accumulated up there in our brain, a ‘lift’ would be a welcome optimization.

Picture: ‘Attic storage’ by Flickr user adriane_l CC-BY

So, if measuring the ‘effectiveness’ is mainly about knowledge content and about storing it safely away (in a compressed way, i.e. in isolated chunks that are typical for ‘left-brained’ thinking), it will be very unbalanced. Measuring OERs, by contrast, offers the opportunity to try out and define new criteria. An obvious new affordance is that you practice your mental ‘muscles‘ more if you have to find your stuff on the web, by navigating and traversing the very connections that ‘are’ the knowledge. But there is much more to research of distributed learning, and much of what I wrote 9 years ago in week 12 of CCK08, does still apply. Filed under: OpenEdMOOC

Week 4 of OpenEdMOOC is about Creating, Finding, and Using Open Educational Resources. I don’t plan do fulfill the task of delivering a 1 hour lecture using OERs, but I was curious how much I would be able to find and how much I would need to create by myself. I was surprised how easy it was to find things.  This is the short message of this post.

If you are interested in a little example from the History of Data Communication, read on.

I have long thought that one day I should create a little graphic, perhaps even an animation, about the OSI 7 layers model, because whenever I saw such a graphic on the web, I was frustrated that it did not emphasize the few aspects that I found fascinating when we built prototype OSI networks.

The basic idea of the services is very simple: Think of two 7-story buildings. In the left-hand one, on the 7th floor, someone wants to send a message to their peer on the 7th floor of the other building. For this purpose, he or she just turns to their aides on the floor below to get this done, without need to think about how all the lower 6 floors of all buildings will collectively delivery that service. The aides on floor 6, in turn, use the services of the all the lower 5 floors in just the same way, and so on.

Now all graphical descriptions that I had seen on the web, enumerated the seven services one after the other, in a loveless way, as if it was a bothersome obligation, such that the listener (if he was not yet asleep) found himself wondering: now what is the difference between transport layer (4) and network layer (3) whose descriptions sounded pretty much the same? (Or likewise, between TCP and IP?) Graphics that left out any 3-floor buildings in between, did not make clear the relaying and routing function of layer 3 and the end-to-end function of layer 4.

Today, the first OER that I found was sufficiently emphasizing both sorts of stacks. I think this is good news.

Source: lecture 1, slide 18, from MIT OCW, CC-BY-NC-SA.

Filed under: OpenEdMOOC

I am no longer on a campus and won’t do the evangelism task of OpenEdMOOC week 3. However, I will at least think about what would be the most urgent cases to address.

There is a wide range of cases for open access, from the one extreme where a publisher just steps in between author and readers and demands money for no service, right through to cases where a large work is assembled through the coordination of many authors including perpetual improvements and enhancements. Textbooks often fall into the latter category, and they are explicitly excluded from the barrier regulations limiting copyright in favor of science and education in Germany.

An important occasion to copy from a textbook is when it contains a great instructional graphic. (Despite the English term ‘text’-book suggests that the text is more important; but in German it is called the equivalent of ‘teach-book’.)

An image says more than 1000 words, and the careful selection of what to show and how to highlight the salient features, is certainly a great intellectual merit. Which deserves credit. But what is protected by copyright is not this idea (at least over here) but merely the ‘work’.

So, what if we take the idea for the picture and draw a new picture, modelled after the antetype of the given one? (Of course not just by following all contours through a sandwich paper or foil.) And then attribute the creator of the original image? According to my legal understanding (which is, of course, not professional) this should comply with the requirements that the work is commercially protected while the idea needs scholarly attribution and credit.

But it is not easy to do such drawings. I tried to redraw some outline of J. M. Flagg’s famous Uncle Sam picture, and miserably failed. (On this occasion I learned that also Flaggs copied the idea from a British precursor).

Filed under: OpenEdMOOC

I liked Wiley’s description of the current copyright situation as a trap (“it can feel really trapping”, 8.24′). Much of what sounds intuitively reasonable is prohibited when a copy of knowledge is treated as economic ‘property’ despite it just doesn’t fit this category in many ways (e.g. the copy is no longer a scarce value, and you can’t inspect it before purchase, you cannot return it and ‘unknow’ it, and so on).

Photo: Trap by Flickr user aydun cc-by

In practice, many try to ignore this trap. For example, when they use the ‘work’ of a textbook image in their course, they often confuse quotation rights with work use rights: if they don’t “critically engage with” the quoted part, they don’t qualify for the former kind of right. Which is meant to apply to an idea which is usually not protected against exploitation but to be tracked for credit and validity. By ignoring this, they won’t notice just how much the trap impedes their teaching even behind a Moodle wall.

Others try to argue ideologically or emotionally, by equating all IP: the rights of a small painter (who makes a living with his works) to the work of a tenured person who writes their books “on their own time” — which nobody dares to critically distinguish from his total time outside the classroom.

But most authors seem to put up with the trap. The prestigious journal is dictator, and they have learned (during their many years as adjunct slaves) that resistance is futile? Wiley has great responses to such kind of senior faculty:

“the only people tying us to the old system is us.”

and

“science advances one funeral at a time.”

 

Filed under: OpenEdMOOC

Testing as recommended on this page:

Course  > Week 1: Why Open Matters  > Getting Ready for the Course  > Course Activities Overview

Filed under: OpenEdMOOC