Should We Open the Past Before Trying to Open the Future? (Part 6 of 6)

Posted on by Peter Nilsson


A decade and a half ago, Web 2.0 brought with it the promise of shared knowledge and collaborative networks.  It seems to me that education hasn’t realized this promise yet.  We haven’t yet created a shared knowledge base or a fully scaled social network for educators.  Surely, an open approach will be essential for succeeding in this.  And yet, before the education sector has figured out how we might realize the promise of shared knowledge, before we have created a successful open environment for teachers to share careers-worth of wisdom and/or to connect at scale, before we have succeeded in education at what other industries have succeeded in, before we do this, we’re instead trying to catapult into Web 4.0, a digital future of artificial intelligence, adaptive learning, mind-to-mind communication, and more.  We’re overleaping teachers and building tools that directly engage the learner.

Surely some of this is appropriate.  The digital age offers many valuable educational tools and opportunities for students to use directly.  But our dreams of hologram tutors, of fully digital curricula, and of machines that read our feelings and anticipate our mistakes are solutions for a future time.  Meanwhile, while we are charting a bold future, we still haven’t succeeded at the past; we haven’t created a successful shared knowledge base; we haven’t connected teachers at scale.  We still haven’t found a way to effectively promote and use what already works, in all varieties of classrooms.

What this suggests to me in the context of this week’s course materials on data, algorithms and competency mapping is that we could be doing more to measure the clicks of teachers, to assess effectiveness of teacher lessons, to algorithmically understand how teachers behave around pedagogical content, digital and non-digital—especially non-digital learning experiences, as these continue to be an enormous part of secondary and primary education.  We could be refining our current imperfect solutions using new data and algorithmic research.

This is not a rebuke of or disdain for the kinds of projects on display in our weekly modules—I’m aiming, I think, only to draw attention to an area of open work that, at least in my experience as a secondary educator and in what I have read, remains unresolved. We want to capture and share the human side of teaching before we replace large swaths of education with digital tools and teaching.  Yes, we should charge ahead with our digital learning tools and our open resources, and also we need to capture and/or establish an organized representation of existing good practice, “research-backed” or no.

In the work I’ve been doing, I’ve been thinking about algorithmic analysis of how teachers engage teaching content, of how customizing and remixing curriculum can demonstrate teacher competency, of data generated by teacher interactions.  What are the new directions and questions in this arena, or have we stopped rapidly innovating here and instead directed our attention to resources students interact with directly?

I’m looking to be called out on this if I’m missing something.  Have we sufficiently examined peer-to-peer networks for teachers?  Are existing efforts more successful than I believe?  OER Commons or the What Works Clearinghouse (curriculum)?  Digital Promise (competency)?  These are visionary.  Are they successful?  Why or why not?  How can they be improved?  By and large, my questions surrounding these topics have gone unanswered; I suspect that is because the great majority of the discussion in this class has been about open resources at the higher ed level: textbooks, academic research, etc.

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Solutions at the secondary level revolve around this week’s themes.  Two problems with establishing a knowledge base for secondary and primary education are the reusability paradox and Justin Reich's claim that curriculum doesn’t compile.  But openness resolves the reusability paradox, and  algorithms and teacher use data are necessary for solving the compiling conundrum.  What I’ve learned from this week is that it’s important to be transparent about how that algorithm works.  If, because there is a sea of content, the system promotes some content to some users and other content to other users—because, perhaps, it was created by teachers at schools in similar socioeconomic contexts—then the system should be open about that, and likely provide teachers the opportunity to either tweak that algorithm or find content in alternative ways.

Another challenge at the secondary level, when curriculum is diffuse, is understanding what makes high quality material.  There are many approaches to assessing quality: ratings, likes, reviews, etc.  Particularly relevant to this week, however, is that if some content is identified as high quality because engagement serves as a proxy for quality or because teacher competency is identified based on particular behaviors evident through data gathering, then, similarly, just as in the previous example, the system should be open about how competency is assessed or about what is being used as proxies for quality.  Keeping this data open and being transparent about algorithms allows the community to measure the measures themselves, and thereby improve them.  Does this also enable people to game the algorithms because they know how it works?  Perhaps. Is there a middle ground?  Perhaps.  This will be some of my thinking in the coming weeks.

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At the end of this course, what I think I have recognized most is that in all these areas—data, algorithms, research, copyright, and more—openness is a philosophical approach.  The leaders of this course—Wiley, Siemens, and our stalwart commentator Downes—are philosopher kings.  (And there are queens out there, too, and one wishes they were more present in the course.)  Their work grows out of a stance that openness is not only better, but right.  Certainly, I agree.

But this belief, of course, makes many things complicated: sustainability, incentive structures, and more.  Not everyone freely gives.  Not everyone expects that something free can be valuable.  Not everyone wants to reuse, revise, or remix.

Still, in the world we live in, in which education is a provision of the state, in which education is a civic, social, and personal necessity, and especially in which education is valued but teachers increasingly seem not to be, then the resources for providing or receiving a good education should be part of the commons, part of a shared wealth.

I’m enthusiastic about the possibilities ahead and look forward to collaborating with colleagues in the future as this work continues.

Platform Design: Research Directions (Part 5 of 6)

Posted on by Peter Nilsson


This course has been a welcome primer on the essentials of OER: from the philosophical foundations of openness to the reasons for each of the five R’s to the provenance and application of Creative Commons.  We’ve had an introduction to and overview of an emerging field.  Of course, the domain of knowledge about OER runs much deeper than the overarching concepts we’ve been exposed to here, but revisiting them at a high level has been a healthy and helpful refresher of what many of us have seen emerge over the past ten years.

It was about ten years ago when I first had an idea for a platform for sharing.  Back then, building it would have been cutting edge.  Now, enthusiasm for yet another OER platform seems pretty tepid, maybe even worthy of a sigh.  So I’d like to ask this community for some advice.

To do so, I’d like to share some of my key takeaways and impressions from the course, and ask for counsel on appropriate next steps for a project.

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Some context: while most people on this course seem to work in higher ed, I teach high school English, and when I began teaching 18 years ago I sought to gather the wisdom of my colleagues in a file cabinet in our department office.  (How quaint!)  After five years, I left teaching to become a musician in New York City.  It was excellent, but I missed the purpose-driven life of an educator, and so I returned to graduate school, and then back to teaching.  During this time, which also brought the advent of social networks and collaborative content management systems, I marveled (in disbelief) that no such network or platform had succeeded at creating a professional knowledge base for educators.  Certainly, this was not for want of trying.  Many efforts had and have since emerged, but none have succeeded at unifying the field.

When thinking about platforms, a few design principles occurred to me then, and, surprised at how infrequently they were adopted or experimented with, I set out about five years ago to test them.  It has been an experience of learning to build and design an organization, to collaborate and lead.  Not the same skills as being a high school teacher.

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This course has validated some of the lessons learned during this time of building a small nonprofit and testing it with teachers.  Many mistakes were made.  Many are yet to be made, too, I’m sure.  Still, many successes have come also: implementation of the prototype for lesson study in a graduate school of education, validation by users in structured environments, and anecdotes that make a maker smile.

This course has also shed light on some essential truths that had been lurking underneath the surface of the work so far, but I hadn’t yet articulated.  Week by week, they unfolded like this:

Week one: I set out some of my hypotheses and first impressions in my first post: “Learning by Sharing: Why We Do, Sometimes Can’t, and Often Don’t”  The key idea in this post is that when building OER platforms, design matters.  What I don’t fully write there is that two key design principles that seemed central to me from the beginning of this work have been rarely implemented in the landscape: a topic-oriented architecture (like Wikipedia) and direct interaction with content (work isn’t trapped in documents, but engaged directly in the browser).  In my questions at the end of this post, I inquire about how to test more formally the significance of these observations and assumptions.

Week two: My post “The Commons: It’s the Community, Stupid” was about a key revelation: the commons isn’t really about the shared resource, the commons is really about our behavior in relation to the shared resource.  Building a repository or a platform won’t change education unless the repository or platform changes the way educators interact with it and each other.  OER are useful only insofar as we use them, and that’s what the community is about.

Week three and week four: both of these lessons and discussions helped reinforce how we can construct knowledge in a way that resolves the reusability paradox.  This challenge has been articulated for years in another way by Justin Reich: that “curriculum doesn’t compile.”  In education, practical knowledge grows like a tree, becoming customized to our classrooms, rarely converging, and so reusability requires revision and remixing.  Without seamless and easy revision and remixture, education resources will languish.

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These statements can be articulated in three hypotheses:
  1. Finding content is easiest in a topic-oriented knowledge architecture. (Week one: design)
  2. Revising and remixing content easily requires direct (non-document-intermediated) interaction with content. (Weeks three and four: usability)
  3. Building community requires patterns of human interaction around content that are driven by fundamental professional or personal needs, matching intellectual demand and supply. (Week two: the commons)

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Over the past four years, with the informal and formal help of many people and the generosity of four schools and two foundations, I’ve developed a prototype platform.  It’s a third generation prototype, growing incrementally towards a coherent vision.  The platform is still closed, because it’s not in a form that is ready for public consumption, but it has a few hundred users and feedback is positive.  We have not yet been systematic and rigorous in our testing—mostly because this work has always been in addition to a full time job (but that feels like an excuse)—but we have also not been shy about gathering lots of feedback, if not through scientific methodologies.

At this point, we’ve developed a topic-oriented architecture (hypothesis 1) and teachers access content directly (hypothesis 2).  But we haven’t yet activated tools for revising and remixing (hypothesis 2) because the chain of repercussions that will follow once peer revision is possible requires design elements not yet implemented.  Lastly, we’ve built the most basic community interaction tools (hypothesis 3), but not yet the planned ones that are essential for matching intellectual demand and supply.

Developing and implementing these final components of a working prototype are the focus of several grant applications currently in the works. (Grateful for references if you know people!)

~

Of course, like any responsible person, I’ve wondered if this has an element of tilting at windmills, of throwing resources at an intractable problem, chasing after some imaginary, inevitably-elusive vision of systemic change.  A well-respected researcher said in a call recently: lots of really smart people have spent hundreds of millions of dollars working on this—what makes you think your approach is any different?  (The same researcher also said that the expertise of those immersed in a subject sometimes gets in the way of seeing the benefits of novel solutions.)  So why persist?  In this case, it’s the overwhelmingly positive feedback from teachers--for whom this work is done--that has continued to propel this project.

And so, since budgets are limited and the scope and cost of the work is growing, the work has transitioned to a phase in which I/we aim to be more rigorous in research and more scientific in testing.  Since the OpenEdMOOC community (especially its professors) are as closely tied to this work as anyone, I have three questions that I’d be grateful for guidance on to ensure that this is a meaningful application of resources (not only money, but also years of my life and others’ too):

~


  • First, could someone offer guidance on what work has been done formally testing/researching knowledge architecture paradigms?  Since the 90s, the biggest paradigm battle was between Yahoo and Google, between trees and search.  Search won.  But Wikipedia models another information architecture paradigm.  And Reddit another.  These have thrived, if imperfectly.  What knowledge architectures have been tested in OER?  Of course, I’m particularly interested in: has a topic-oriented approach been tested?


  • Secondly and similarly, has there been much research on successfully scaling educator communities?  Edmodo created a user group for Language Arts teachers that has 550K members (though not all active).  Ask a question there and you’ll get an answer.  TeachersPayTeachers has created a supply of resources that covers virtually every content area.  Want something to teach? You can find it there, but you have to pay for it.  One is a successful community (if not a successful business).  The other is a successful content repository (if not an open community).  We’ll succeed when the twain meet.  Is there recent research on essential components for scaling communities?  My favorite so far is the US DOE’s Exploratory Research on Designing Online Communities, which offers questions, if not directions.


  • Lastly, do you have recommendations of models for rigorous user (teacher) testing?  To a researcher, this question is, of course, hopelessly vague—there are thousands of models for testing—but the question is meant to surface reports that offer replicable methodologies that are broad-reaching in their analysis of how teachers behave online when interacting with educational content or each other… and that are also understandable to someone who doesn’t know what a Q-methodology is.   My favorite example is from work done by the Smithsonian Institute in 2012 during their Digital Learning Resources Project.  Are you aware of other research that a (very) small team could emulate?


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These are questions designed to help determine whether this work is a fruitful application of time and funds—and what next steps for this project make sense.  I’m grateful for your guidance.

Resolving the Reusability Paradox (Part 4 of 6)

Format ImagePosted on by Peter Nilsson

Being reminded of the Reusability Paradox (something I had been introduced to a handful of years ago, but had no context for deeply understanding then) might have been one of the most critical components of this course to date for me.  

In brief (and in my own words), the Reusability Paradox states that the more useful something is in a given moment in a given classroom, the less useful it is in other moments in other classrooms.  The more a question serves a particular purpose for you, the less it will be useful for others.  Conversely, the more generally useful something is for everyone, the less useful it is at any given moment.  But once you customize it to make it useful in a given moment, the less useful it is to others.

The example of this in my mind has been the discourse surrounding growth mindset.  Everyone is excited about growth mindsets.  But how is that useful for a math teacher who is teaching how to factor polynomials?  In order to make it useful in that context, the math teacher says to a struggling student, "let's try completing the square" or "have we tried all strategies for factoring?" Because these encourage different strategies, questions or activities help a math student believe that their intelligence isn't fixed, and that they can improve at math by learning and trying different strategies for factoring polynomials.

But now that the particular learning approach/object/experience has been customized to be relevant to math teachers only.  Once customized with the language of a discipline the intervention is no longer useful to English teachers, history teachers, language teachers, etc.  This is the Reusability Paradox.  The more useful something is to you, the less useful it is to someone else.


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This paradox had been lodged in my mind as something unresolved, and even in my notes from this week’s lecture, I included Wiley’s follow up statement—“The permissions granted by open licenses are the escape hatch from the reusability paradox.”—almost as an afterthought.  In the context of this week, the Reusability Paradox arose in discussion briefly, was lightly brushed aside, and then the lecture moved on.  The paradox was an accepted fate, and something of a non-issue.

But revisiting notes from old conversations and rooting around in recent blog posts by Audrey Watters (9/2017) and David Wiley (4/2015) led me to the realization that there has been contentious, exasperating, protracted discussion about "learning objects" (usable, portable bits of curriculum) in the context of the Reusability Paradox.  


And, it also led me to the rediscovery that the paradox has a solution, and that Wiley's offhand remark about an "escape hatch" is actually quite significant.

So, I created a simple image—graph and text—as a reminder that the learning object isn’t doomed, but that if it is to be (re)incarnated, it must be done so in a way that is remixable, fully. If we are to share bits of curriculum, we need to be sure that they are customizable, that they are fully open.  Without this capability, their usefulness to others is limited.  This is crucial.

I wonder if I should be confident in this conclusion, that I can take it as fact, or whether, as Watters cautions, I should dive more deeply to better understand the history of the debate.  We have time to only know so much...


~

Upon reflection, I've seen this borne out in my own work on a local sharing platform.  We administered a survey to participants in a summer fellowship built around sharing resources.  What did they say they were looking for online?


It was clear that our teachers wanted flexibility.  They didn't want fixed objects.  Reusability comes from being able to tweak other people's practices.  They wanted ideas that they can fine tune, or conceptual frames that they can then design within. 

And this validates Wiley's "escape hatch."  The Reusability Paradox isn't a paradox at all if what matters most is a teacher's ability to edit, revise, tweak, or remix what other teachers have done.  The ability to change is all.  To adapt.  Teachers want to customize for their own settings.  They want to design it anew.

It's no wonder.  Teaching is the most creative profession I can think of.  We are designing experiences every single day, and delivering/performing them (even when we are the guide on the side) every single day.  The thrill is as much in preparation and delivery--in the design and execution--as it is in the relationships we form, the learning we structure, and outcomes we foster.

Sharing Knowledge and Networks: Synchronous vs. Stigmergic (Part 3 of 6)

Format ImagePosted on by Peter Nilsson

“You’re trying to get at two things—sort of the latent capacity of knowledge that exists with this system, and secondly, you’re trying to connect people as part of a network.” (Siemens)

A shared knowledge base and vigorous, responsive innovation.  These are the purposes, in my mind, for a robust network of open education resources.  Without open knowledge, we cannot accumulate a shared knowledge base, we will continue reinventing the wheel in our classes.  Without an open network, even if we are able to establish a shared knowledge base, we will not be able to foster the creativity and innovation in education necessary to keep up with the creativity and innovation in the world we are preparing our students for—while also keeping our eyes on what is and ought to remain timeless.  We must establish a shared knowledge base, and we must be able to be as nimble and responsive with that knowledge base as other industries are.

Siemens and Wiley articulate this in two slightly different ways.  Siemens speaks of the “latent capacity of knowledge that exists in the system.”  I understand this to mean that Siemens is looking to capture the existent but unarticulated professional knowledge of educators—knowledge that we all know teachers have, but which has not been shared—and looking to capture it by connecting people in a vibrant network.

Wiley explores the mechanics of this:

“In some cases, that network is synchronous, and you know who those other people are, and you’re collaborating with them in real time. And in other places, it's more of a stigmergy kind of approach, where other people have come before. They've left the artifact in this state, and when you pick it up, you're like, oh, I can see the next thing that needs to happen, and you pick that up and take it. And maybe both of those things are happening in parallel, in some ways.” (Wiley)

First of all, thanks for the word “stigmergy”—that’s a good one!  

What Wiley gets at here is that, first, synchronous knowledge sharing is a powerful tool for growth.  We see this every day in our best department meetings and professional collaborations: we’re working on something, have questions, talk with colleagues, and we all grow into something better.  We’re starting to see online versions of this in Video conferencing, Google documents, and more.  And Wiley also describes “stigmergic” interactions, when we work asynchronously on some kind of shared object (Wikipedia) or forking objects (GitHub).  Stigmergic collaboration is best exemplified, perhaps, in the great tree of academic scholarship, in which we all, in the words of John of Salisbury (way back in 1159), stand “on the shoulders of giants.”

So: we want to capture knowledge, collect it, connect people around it, and enable people to change it.  This reorders the five R’s a little bit for me.  At the foundation are: retain, reuse, and redistribute—these are capturing and sharing knowledge.  And then, to function in a changing world: revise and remix.  These are changing and innovating.

(Several years ago I assembled a taxonomy for creative design, for understanding and analyzing creativity, and the stages of work follow a similar progression: imitation, variation, combination, transformation, and original creation.  We start with the object, and then we change it.)


In the field of education, where the object is a shared knowledge base, and change means making it flexible, revisable, remix-able, in its entirely, these two stages are both enormous tasks, and we have much work to do.  Which comes first: establishing the knowledge base or the network?  Surely, they must be developed incrementally together.

The Commons: It’s the Community (Part 2 of 6)

Posted on by Peter Nilsson
Thomas Jefferson, on the ability for ideas to infinitely diffuse
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“But the commons isn’t a thing, it’s a process that involves everyone in the community working to share and distribute it fairly.  People continually and diligently build and sustain a commons by negotiating how best to distribute the commons, creating the rules they need to manage the commons together, and building the infrastructure needed to keep the commons thriving for generations to come.”
~

We just can’t escape you, Marshall McLuhan.

The commons, David Bollier tells us, isn’t a thing; the commons is the process that enables the thing.  It’s not the pasture in the middle of town, or the knowledge we have amassed, it’s the agreements, habits, and behaviors that enable the shared ownership of the pasture or knowledge.  

More concretely: Wikipedia isn’t about the topic pages we read when we look something up, it’s about the policies and guidelines that editors generally follow (nicely reduced to an essential five pillars).  It’s about the talk pages.  Wikipedia is really about the community it has fostered and the modes of engagement it has created—all of which result, ultimately, in the topic pages we read.  

But these pages, while they are the ultimate goal, are almost a byproduct.  What matters most, in some ways, is not the words on the screen, but how we have changed human behavior.  We work together: we make changes individually, we enter discussion about areas of conflict and disagreement, we reorganize information based on new understanding.  We interact with each other in new ways.  This capability for mass collaboration is the commons.  Wikipedia, David Bollier’s definition suggests, isn’t about knowledge so much as it is about the way people collaborate to create knowledge.

The content isn’t the message; the medium is the message.

~

This says to me that we can amass knowledge all we want, but what matters in the long run is how we change behavior patterns.  Will we develop habits and norms around shared resources, cooperation, and collaboration, or will we further close and divide knowledge, appropriating it for private ends? 

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In 2006, in “The Surprising History of Copyright in a Post-Copyright World,” Karl Fogel laid out a likely future for the relationship between the closed commercial world and the open commons:

“There won't be a dramatic battle between the publishing industry and the copying public, with a climax, a denouement, and a clear winner striding out of the dust. Instead, what we will see — are already seeing — is the emergence of two parallel streams of creative work: the proprietary stream, and the free stream. Every day, more people join the free stream, of their own volition, for all sorts of reasons… The proprietary stream cannot survive forever, in the face of such competition. The abolition of copyright law is optional; the real force here is creators freely choosing to release their works for unrestricted copying, because it's in their interests to do so. At some point, it will be obvious that all the interesting stuff is going on in the free stream, and people will simply cease dipping into the proprietary one.”

This is a hopeful vision, and one that seems inevitable in the context of Thomas Jefferson’s even more idealistic vision of the nature of intellectual property:  

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

The outcome of the commons, Jefferson tells us, “seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made [it], like fire, expansible over all space.” And realizing Jefferson’s vision of total expansion of knowledge, Fogel suggests, is only a game of attrition.  The force of “free” will inevitably dethrone the proprietary world’s current power.

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Complicating our efforts at achieving openness—the commons—are questions of ownership.  And this goes beyond whether or not an OER is copyrighted, but specifically who owns the copyright.

The copyright principle that keeps coming up in discussions I’m having is the “work for hire” or “made for hire” principle.  If materials are created for a workplace, then in some contexts it is the workplace that technically owns the material.  Teachers, some argue, don’t necessarily own the lessons we create; instead, schools do.  Henry Trotter speaks about this when he says, “While educators are typically free to incorporate OER into their materials as users, they aren't often able to share their own teaching materials openly as OER because they have no legal standing to do so.”  

(So many questions follow: in the US, who owns the material?  How often is ownership enforced?  Has there been much litigation on this?  How has it resolved?)

In the face of the complicating question of copyright ownership, what can institutions and individuals do to promote openness?  Trotter says simply: “The best possible approach may be to simply encourage… institutions to take it upon themselves to share their educators’ materials as OER. MIT, of course, pioneered an approach similar to this with its OpenCourseWare.”  Helpfully, the OECD’s Giving Knowledge for Free offers a clear set of six rationales for institutions to do just what Trotter invites.  These arguments are:

  1. Sharing knowledge is a good thing to do.
  2. Educational institutions should leverage taxpayers’ money by allowing free sharing and reuse of resources.
  3. By sharing and reusing, the costs for content development can be cut, thereby making better use of available resources.
  4. It is good for public relations and it can function as a showcase to attract new students.
  5. There is a need to look for new cost recovery models [and] offering content for free [works] as an advertisement for the institution…
  6. Open sharing will speed up the development of new learning resources, stimulate internal improvement, innovation and reuse.

Similarly, the OECD report find four arguments for individual educators to share openly, too:

  1. Altruistic or community support reasons.
  2. Personal non-monetary gain.
  3. Commercial reasons [by commercializing other content]
  4. It is not worth the effort to keep the resource closed.

The extent to which institutions and individuals are swayed by these arguments determines the extent to which we can realize the vision of openness.

~

What does this look like to me, someone in secondary schools today?  It’s pitting TeachersPayTeachers against OER Commons—with a host of alternatives in between.  

From this vantage point, unfortunately, five years after a kindergarten teacher made a million dollars selling her lessons, it looks like the proprietary landscape is in the lead.  Wikipedia has been a model for educators for a decade and a half.  OER Commons has been around for a decade, and the OECD’s rationales for sharing have lived just as long, but the greatest traction to date appears to be in the for profit sector.  It's understandable: profit is a powerful incentive to individuals as well as institutions.

And so, while publishing has decentralized, giving power to individuals so teachers can market themselves, much knowledge and what appears to be the majority of the market remains closed.  It may be, in fact, that the web’s decentralization of publishing has provided financial incentives for teachers (through TeachersPayTeachers and its copycats) such that the proprietary model is even further entrenched—almost regardless of the copyright complications. In this light, Fogel’s claim that “the real force here is creators freely choosing to release their works for unrestricted copying, because it’s in their interests to do so” hasn’t yet been realized. We are far from the ideal of the commons.  

But I believe this will change in time.

Surely, if Jefferson’s vision of non-rivalrous knowledge is true, and if the Internet makes diffusion of information essentially free, then the education resource industry will eventually break down and restructure, just as many others have.  But how? And when?


~

“At some point,” Fogel declares, “it will be obvious that all the interesting stuff is going on in the free stream.”  It’s telling, perhaps, that he doesn’t say that “the interesting stuff is in the free stream”; he says, “the interesting stuff is going on in the free stream.”  It’s activity, not content.  This tiny turn of phrase is a reminder of Bollier’s point about the commons: it’s about what we do with each other.  It’s not about the stuff. 

If Bollier is right, then wooing educators to openness will come from designing collaborative experiences, not amassing content.  It will come from communities.  The proprietary landscape will break down when we get that right.


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I’m participating this fall in a six week online edX course called “Introduction to Open Education.” It’s an effort to formalize and deepen my knowledge base on issues related to Open Education, which are central to my work developing Athena, a platform for teachers to find, share, and develop practices. The course involves a weekly written reflection, each of which I’ll be posting here. A disclaimer: I’m new to academic study of the field, and I’m representing perspectives and texts based on my relatively limited exposure. Please forgive any mischaracterizations—or better yet, in the spirit of the course, offer open and constructive feedback. Thank you!

Learning by Sharing: Why We Do, Sometimes Can’t, and Often Don’t (Part 1 of 6)

Posted on by Peter Nilsson

I’m participating this fall in a six week online edX course called “Introduction to Open Education.” It’s an effort to formalize and deepen my knowledge base on issues related to Open Education, which are central to my work developing Athena, a platform for teachers to find, share, and develop practices. The course involves a weekly written reflection, each of which I’ll be posting here. A disclaimer: I’m new to academic study of the field, and I’m representing perspectives and texts based on my relatively limited exposure. Please forgive any mischaracterizations—or better yet, in the spirit of the course, offer open and constructive feedback. Thank you!

The case: sharing is learning

In a conversation with George Siemens at the introduction to the course, David Wiley describes how the early Open Education community had to bolster its arguments with conclusive research about the value of using Open Education Resources (OER). The research was done, and it appears to have been successful. At the base of a video describing how one university uses Open Education Resources the course site writes:
“Research, commissioned by an e-textbook provider, supports a growing body of evidence that suggests the use of open and affordable course resources can positively impact student success, resulting in higher course grades and lower drop, failure, and withdrawal rates.”
The implication here--and also in the links at the targeted page above, and also in other reading I have just begun--suggests that the category of OER includes materials that are directly accessible to students (curated by instructors) and materials that instructors learn from and apply to their classrooms (e.g. lesson plans that do not require students to use online resources).  I am interested in both of these, but am specifically interested in how or whether the research above also applies to teacher learning.  Teachers can serve as curators of OER to improve student learning.  Can teacher use of OER also improve teacher teaching?  (I think there’s a difference there.)  

The beginning of an answer is apparent in many of the philosophical principles articulated in the opening videos.  First among them is George Siemens’ observation that “transparency and openness of sharing our experiences [is] essentially a teaching practice" (link)  Or, more simply: sharing our learning is teaching.  Happily, we see this more and more in education today—a cultural shift from the silo-ed classrooms of memory—and it aligns completely with what I have always felt to be the best professional development: teachers talking with teachers about teaching.



Similarly, a colleague of mine is taking another edX course (Launching Innovation in Schools), and one lesson from its first week is that administrators are not intended to be instructional experts.  Rather, their role in regards to professional development is to create more opportunities for teachers to learn from each other.

Systems and barriers: what can we do?

So what’s most important when connecting teachers around what it is that we’re teaching?  If sharing is learning, what do we need in order to share well, and what gets in the way?

In his “course participant open reflection,” Stephen Downes frames open learning in the context of networks.  He shares four principles of networks (autonomy, diversity, openness, and connectivity), and argues that “It's not about stuff.  It's not about what you do with stuff.  It’s about what you did with each other.”  There’s some Marshall McLuhan in this.  What matters is the medium: how you interacted, what you’re able to do, who else is there—how the experience of knowledge is influenced by the network. In order for teachers (and students, though again, I’m focusing on teachers)—in order for teachers to learn and share, we need effective networks.

Wiley comes at the question from a different, but (I think) not contradictory perspective.  He says, “If we learn by the things that we do… and if the function of copyright is to restrict or prescribe the things we're able to do, then that means that copyright prohibits us from learning in some ways we might otherwise be able to learn.”  The focus here is on copyright.  It’s not on the network itself, but on a particular barrier to a successful network.  Were I to read further into Downes’ model, I suspect some of this would be included in his category “openness.”



Happily, the introductory videos also touch down on the development of copyright protocols like Creative Commons.  These efforts (which Wiley folded some of his work into as it began to align) have endeavored to smooth out impediments to creating a successful network in what I perceive to be Downes’ model.

From why we can’t to why we don’t

So theories for networks and openness are growing more developed, despite the relative youth of the field, and a variety of parties appear to be putting together the necessary pieces to establish an open education ecosystem.  And as is plainly known by everyone who has glanced at the field, there are dozen/scores/hundreds of open resources out in the world wild west web.  So why don’t most educators (from this anecdotal, secondary school perspective) use them?  My hunch is that the answer lies elsewhere: design.

An element of OER that doesn’t appear to be part of the course curriculum, but which is buried in some of the reading, is the design of the OER environments.  Starting with one excellent external source provided in the course (Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources, produced by the OECD), I had joyous trip down the endnote rabbit hole.  The OECD report, when exploring business models, noted: “Dholakia (2006) also stresses that growing competition among initiatives creates a need to develop strong brands, user communities, increased site usability and improved quality of the resources offered” (p. 95).  

I leapt on the statement about “increased site usability” and followed my way to Dholakia, who, in What Makes an Open Education Program Sustainable?, wrote: “A key determinant of site adoption by authors and instructors is how easy it is to use the site (e.g., Spool, et al., 1998; Wei et al., 2005). Authors and instructors will only be interested in using the OEP [Open Education Program] site if they can upload their content and modify it effortlessly, in the format and layout of their choice. Consequently, user-friendliness is a critical driver of value for OEP users.”  What a treat it was, then, to follow the endnote line all the way back to Jared Spool’s writing from the late 90s, when he described user interfaces in the Netscape era.  Remarkably, while we no longer talk about frames in our browsers, many of the principles from Spool’s research still seem to apply.  

Perhaps we see what we want to see—it’s likely!—but this seems to me to be as significant a limiting factor in OER adoption as anything else.  It is less structural (Wiley), and it doesn’t speak to components of networks (Downes), but it does influence whether we choose to share, which then influences whether and how much we learn (Siemens).


~

It strikes me every day that teachers have so little easy access to each other, and I suppose the crucial word that I see in that phrase is “easy.”  To bring about change at a large scale, to improve the rate of sharing between educators, we need not only to build the infrastructure, but also to make the experience pleasurable.  Writing this, I recognize that this is my pre-conceived notion, coming from an external, surface-level understanding of the field.  I look forward to learning more about the layers that lie underneath.