1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,220 2 00:00:03,220 --> 00:00:06,070 GEORGE SIEMENS: What were you doing as you made your shift from Utah 3 00:00:06,070 --> 00:00:08,930 State to BYU to Lumen Learning? 4 00:00:08,930 --> 00:00:12,160 DAVID WILEY: So I'll tell that story, but then I want to hear yours, too. 5 00:00:12,160 --> 00:00:16,870 For me, when I look back at it, I think of it in five year chunks. 6 00:00:16,870 --> 00:00:19,150 There was a period of time when I pretended 7 00:00:19,150 --> 00:00:22,750 to be an IP lawyer, which was dangerous and terrible 8 00:00:22,750 --> 00:00:25,780 and nobody without the right qualifications should ever do that. 9 00:00:25,780 --> 00:00:27,520 There's the open content license. 10 00:00:27,520 --> 00:00:30,210 I worked with Eric Raymond on the open publication license, 11 00:00:30,210 --> 00:00:34,190 that which the Cathedral in the Bazaar is published under still to this day. 12 00:00:34,190 --> 00:00:36,880 There was a period of time where just basic licensing work had 13 00:00:36,880 --> 00:00:38,713 to be done because we couldn't share, and we 14 00:00:38,713 --> 00:00:42,057 couldn't do any of the other awesome things that come along with open 15 00:00:42,057 --> 00:00:43,640 until you had that mechanism in place. 16 00:00:43,640 --> 00:00:46,360 So there is a period of time of pretending to do, 17 00:00:46,360 --> 00:00:48,580 like creating licenses and advocating for that. 18 00:00:48,580 --> 00:00:50,414 And then Creative Commons came along, people 19 00:00:50,414 --> 00:00:52,038 who actually knew what they were doing. 20 00:00:52,038 --> 00:00:54,130 And as soon as that existed, I deprecated our work 21 00:00:54,130 --> 00:00:58,360 and said please go start using theirs. 22 00:00:58,360 --> 00:01:00,970 From there it seemed like there was a period of time where 23 00:01:00,970 --> 00:01:06,160 we were trying to persuade people that if you share things with other people 24 00:01:06,160 --> 00:01:08,305 under these open licenses, the universe won't end. 25 00:01:08,305 --> 00:01:09,180 GEORGE SIEMENS: Yeah. 26 00:01:09,180 --> 00:01:11,013 DAVID WILEY: So there was a lot of talk when 27 00:01:11,013 --> 00:01:14,530 MIT OpenCourseWare launched that they had undercut their own funding model. 28 00:01:14,530 --> 00:01:15,980 They destroyed their business. 29 00:01:15,980 --> 00:01:18,490 They were going to go under because if you give away 30 00:01:18,490 --> 00:01:20,860 all of the MIT content, what's left? 31 00:01:20,860 --> 00:01:25,495 Of course, as we understand, there's lots to education beyond the content. 32 00:01:25,495 --> 00:01:28,120 But so there was this period of advocating for people to share, 33 00:01:28,120 --> 00:01:29,110 and part of the work-- 34 00:01:29,110 --> 00:01:32,193 maybe in some ways the core work-- we did at Utah State during that period 35 00:01:32,193 --> 00:01:34,070 was saying-- 36 00:01:34,070 --> 00:01:37,891 In some ways, it's kind of crazy that MIT has this whole message around open 37 00:01:37,891 --> 00:01:39,140 and sharing all their content. 38 00:01:39,140 --> 00:01:43,610 But the platform that they use to do that is proprietary. 39 00:01:43,610 --> 00:01:47,270 So we developed a platform very similar to theirs, which was open source 40 00:01:47,270 --> 00:01:50,134 and then went around the world advocating for people 41 00:01:50,134 --> 00:01:51,800 to share their material and to share it. 42 00:01:51,800 --> 00:01:55,310 Here's a platform to use to manage that process. 43 00:01:55,310 --> 00:01:57,562 And then once there is a lot of content out there 44 00:01:57,562 --> 00:01:59,270 and people have begun sharing, then there 45 00:01:59,270 --> 00:02:03,800 needs to be work around encouraging people not just to share, 46 00:02:03,800 --> 00:02:07,610 but to actually begin to use things that other people have shared. 47 00:02:07,610 --> 00:02:11,210 Because there is a lot of press releases about hey, we put 12 courses online. 48 00:02:11,210 --> 00:02:12,440 We put 20 courses online. 49 00:02:12,440 --> 00:02:15,537 But you could not find a person anywhere that had said, 50 00:02:15,537 --> 00:02:18,620 I'm going to stop using the textbook or the materials I've used previously 51 00:02:18,620 --> 00:02:21,899 in the course, and I'm going to adopt this other person's material 52 00:02:21,899 --> 00:02:22,690 and use it instead. 53 00:02:22,690 --> 00:02:24,740 That just wasn't going on. 54 00:02:24,740 --> 00:02:26,540 And we realized pretty quickly that there 55 00:02:26,540 --> 00:02:30,920 were a bunch of conceptual problems that people had or misunderstandings people 56 00:02:30,920 --> 00:02:33,320 had that prevented them from doing that. 57 00:02:33,320 --> 00:02:37,062 And so then my work kind of turned into a phase of empirical research, 58 00:02:37,062 --> 00:02:39,020 published and peer reviewed outlets, so looking 59 00:02:39,020 --> 00:02:43,040 at the impact of OER Adoption-- of Open Educational Resources 60 00:02:43,040 --> 00:02:48,874 Adoption-- on student outcomes, on faculty happiness, on things like that. 61 00:02:48,874 --> 00:02:51,290 And then once that research base was sufficiently built up 62 00:02:51,290 --> 00:02:54,272 that you could end an argument by saying, hey, what about? 63 00:02:54,272 --> 00:02:56,480 And then you could lay down several journal articles, 64 00:02:56,480 --> 00:02:58,521 and people could read through them and understand 65 00:02:58,521 --> 00:03:01,370 why their concern had been addressed. 66 00:03:01,370 --> 00:03:02,700 Then it just became-- 67 00:03:02,700 --> 00:03:06,080 The last several years have been purely practical on the ground trying 68 00:03:06,080 --> 00:03:11,560 to support this adoption of open educational resources. 69 00:03:11,560 --> 00:03:15,330 So for me personally, that's how I see my journey of infrastructure work, 70 00:03:15,330 --> 00:03:19,290 enabling that infrastructure work from licensing to software; 71 00:03:19,290 --> 00:03:21,290 and getting people actually involved in sharing; 72 00:03:21,290 --> 00:03:22,915 trying to understand what happens when we share, 73 00:03:22,915 --> 00:03:26,230 and make sure that we're not going to destroy the endeavor of education 74 00:03:26,230 --> 00:03:30,290 with this; and then going to try to make it happen. 75 00:03:30,290 --> 00:03:33,700 So I've shared a bit of my story now of my perspective of where this started 76 00:03:33,700 --> 00:03:34,700 and where it came from. 77 00:03:34,700 --> 00:03:37,900 But these kinds of stories are really unique to each individual. 78 00:03:37,900 --> 00:03:41,045 So I'd love to hear you just riff a little bit on 79 00:03:41,045 --> 00:03:43,420 how you came into this work, and how you saw it progress, 80 00:03:43,420 --> 00:03:45,430 and how you've moved through it personally. 81 00:03:45,430 --> 00:03:48,620 GEORGE SIEMENS: Well for me, it was I think almost accidental. 82 00:03:48,620 --> 00:03:52,750 So, as I mentioned before, I was at a small system in Manitoba, Red River 83 00:03:52,750 --> 00:03:53,410 College. 84 00:03:53,410 --> 00:03:56,230 And the experience-- 85 00:03:56,230 --> 00:04:00,880 Ours was the first college in Canada that went with a laptop program, 86 00:04:00,880 --> 00:04:03,310 and by going with a laptop program, basically 87 00:04:03,310 --> 00:04:06,640 it meant that all the students in the program received a laptop. 88 00:04:06,640 --> 00:04:09,380 And by received I mean they paid a lot of money for them. 89 00:04:09,380 --> 00:04:11,424 And what would end up happening-- 90 00:04:11,424 --> 00:04:12,590 and this part fascinated me. 91 00:04:12,590 --> 00:04:15,610 I think in some ways, even though I wasn't conscious of it at the time, 92 00:04:15,610 --> 00:04:17,560 continues to be a driving question for me. 93 00:04:17,560 --> 00:04:22,857 But the students in the back half of the classroom, everyone had a laptop. 94 00:04:22,857 --> 00:04:25,690 And of course they did cool things that kids do, which at that point 95 00:04:25,690 --> 00:04:29,740 it was all ICQ and whatever else, and sharing information. 96 00:04:29,740 --> 00:04:33,970 The teacher in the front the classroom, though, moved from transparencies 97 00:04:33,970 --> 00:04:35,320 to PowerPoint. 98 00:04:35,320 --> 00:04:38,410 And I was really struck by what changed. 99 00:04:38,410 --> 00:04:42,880 I mean, the teacher didn't change practices very much, 100 00:04:42,880 --> 00:04:45,910 but the students changed their actions significantly. 101 00:04:45,910 --> 00:04:50,150 And so we had a tool that was used for online testing. 102 00:04:50,150 --> 00:04:53,650 And when you start to find out that the landscape changes-- 103 00:04:53,650 --> 00:04:57,160 it's very hard to be a control freak in a network. 104 00:04:57,160 --> 00:05:00,192 And so when the landscape changes where the students had control, 105 00:05:00,192 --> 00:05:01,900 in the middle of a test students would be 106 00:05:01,900 --> 00:05:06,280 ICQing one another questions and answers to the test; which, from a faculty end, 107 00:05:06,280 --> 00:05:09,700 we hadn't thought of because we were still thinking of a traditional control 108 00:05:09,700 --> 00:05:13,880 structure rather than a networked information exchange structure. 109 00:05:13,880 --> 00:05:15,640 And so I think that question was probably 110 00:05:15,640 --> 00:05:17,950 one of the most pronounced ones is how does technology 111 00:05:17,950 --> 00:05:20,830 alter the experiences of knowledge development 112 00:05:20,830 --> 00:05:22,660 for those who traditionally were providers 113 00:05:22,660 --> 00:05:25,390 of knowledge versus those who would be classified more as seekers 114 00:05:25,390 --> 00:05:26,320 of knowledge. 115 00:05:26,320 --> 00:05:28,630 And it made a far more equitable landscape, 116 00:05:28,630 --> 00:05:32,230 but also created a whole series of challenges and problems. 117 00:05:32,230 --> 00:05:34,600 So I think for me that would be one starting point, 118 00:05:34,600 --> 00:05:37,390 was realizing that being open-- 119 00:05:37,390 --> 00:05:40,540 and by open at this point doesn't really mean open source software. 120 00:05:40,540 --> 00:05:43,168 It just meant part of the process of learning was open. 121 00:05:43,168 --> 00:05:43,925 And-- 122 00:05:43,925 --> 00:05:46,300 DAVID WILEY: And by open, you mean visible to the public. 123 00:05:46,300 --> 00:05:46,900 GEORGE SIEMENS: Transparent. 124 00:05:46,900 --> 00:05:47,830 Visible. 125 00:05:47,830 --> 00:05:51,319 The teacher couldn't control who says what and when. 126 00:05:51,319 --> 00:05:53,110 And around that time, as I mentioned, I was 127 00:05:53,110 --> 00:05:56,620 starting with blogging and just experiencing 128 00:05:56,620 --> 00:05:59,020 how easy it was to just FTP your posts. 129 00:05:59,020 --> 00:06:00,920 At that time, that's how Blogger operated. 130 00:06:00,920 --> 00:06:03,730 Eventually it went to movable type, and then of course these days most people 131 00:06:03,730 --> 00:06:04,450 are on WordPress. 132 00:06:04,450 --> 00:06:07,390 But it was just that experience of I could 133 00:06:07,390 --> 00:06:10,810 have a voice that absolutely no one would necessarily need to listen to. 134 00:06:10,810 --> 00:06:13,390 But I found being able to share and post my ideas 135 00:06:13,390 --> 00:06:15,140 was a learning experience for me. 136 00:06:15,140 --> 00:06:18,730 And I found later that it's a teaching experience, as I mentioned earlier, 137 00:06:18,730 --> 00:06:20,770 when I'm learning transparently. 138 00:06:20,770 --> 00:06:23,920 Then over a period of time, coming across the work 139 00:06:23,920 --> 00:06:28,472 of a number of individuals that were similarly involved in a shared journey, 140 00:06:28,472 --> 00:06:30,430 not necessarily directly interacting with them, 141 00:06:30,430 --> 00:06:32,159 but very much being aware of them. 142 00:06:32,159 --> 00:06:34,450 And of course this is people like you and Stephen Downs 143 00:06:34,450 --> 00:06:37,960 and others that were playing in this landscape at the time. 144 00:06:37,960 --> 00:06:42,850 Then in 2004, I wrote not a very good article 145 00:06:42,850 --> 00:06:47,120 but still has far more citations than anything else I've ever written. 146 00:06:47,120 --> 00:06:50,290 It was called Connectivism, you know digital theory or theory 147 00:06:50,290 --> 00:06:51,760 of learning for the digital age. 148 00:06:51,760 --> 00:06:53,510 And what I was trying to communicate there 149 00:06:53,510 --> 00:06:56,500 was crystallize the experiences of being open; 150 00:06:56,500 --> 00:06:59,410 the experiences of me being able to share my knowledge. 151 00:06:59,410 --> 00:07:04,120 And then the fascinating thing that would come by is I would post-- 152 00:07:04,120 --> 00:07:04,930 put a blog post up. 153 00:07:04,930 --> 00:07:07,780 Somebody would come by and comment on it, and then on their own site 154 00:07:07,780 --> 00:07:10,810 would perhaps take that idea and extend it. 155 00:07:10,810 --> 00:07:14,080 And all of a sudden, there's this idea of if I create an artifact 156 00:07:14,080 --> 00:07:15,860 and I make it openly available-- 157 00:07:15,860 --> 00:07:17,470 And at this point, it was just Access. 158 00:07:17,470 --> 00:07:18,530 It wasn't even-- 159 00:07:18,530 --> 00:07:20,650 We just had it as Ethos that you share. 160 00:07:20,650 --> 00:07:23,560 And so it wasn't that yeah, it might have been a copyrighted post, 161 00:07:23,560 --> 00:07:25,900 but that doesn't mean that someone can't take it, refine it, improve 162 00:07:25,900 --> 00:07:27,370 it, or whatever because it was an ethos of just-- 163 00:07:27,370 --> 00:07:28,360 DAVID WILEY: That was the expectation. 164 00:07:28,360 --> 00:07:29,610 GEORGE SIEMENS: Yeah, exactly. 165 00:07:29,610 --> 00:07:33,010 And so, that part I think was the second marking point 166 00:07:33,010 --> 00:07:37,750 for me was this idea of connectedness, and that by being connected-- 167 00:07:37,750 --> 00:07:40,390 being transparent and connected-- you produced 168 00:07:40,390 --> 00:07:44,470 this huge array of potential knowledge futures in these areas. 169 00:07:44,470 --> 00:07:46,720 Anyone could come by, argue with it, rather 170 00:07:46,720 --> 00:07:48,310 than going through a journal pathway-- 171 00:07:48,310 --> 00:07:49,780 like, I write an article. 172 00:07:49,780 --> 00:07:51,905 Three years later someone comes by and says George, 173 00:07:51,905 --> 00:07:53,613 you don't know what you're talking about. 174 00:07:53,613 --> 00:07:54,800 This is what it really is. 175 00:07:54,800 --> 00:07:56,000 The culture was amazing. 176 00:07:56,000 --> 00:08:00,280 There was people like Darcy Norman and Alan Levine and others that-- 177 00:08:00,280 --> 00:08:02,800 you'd have an idea in the morning, and by the afternoon 178 00:08:02,800 --> 00:08:06,040 somebody would have produced a script or somebody would have told you 179 00:08:06,040 --> 00:08:08,800 that your idea was absolutely nonsense, very convincingly, 180 00:08:08,800 --> 00:08:11,380 and the list goes on. 181 00:08:11,380 --> 00:08:14,190 So that was a really significant marking point-- 182 00:08:14,190 --> 00:08:16,201 those two experiences. 183 00:08:16,201 --> 00:08:17,950 DAVID WILEY: So let me just interject here 184 00:08:17,950 --> 00:08:20,960 because what I hear you saying is that the relationship between open 185 00:08:20,960 --> 00:08:23,770 and this connectivism work is that you can't 186 00:08:23,770 --> 00:08:25,770 connect to something that's closed. 187 00:08:25,770 --> 00:08:28,030 GEORGE SIEMENS: Yeah, or you can, but the lag 188 00:08:28,030 --> 00:08:30,340 is so long that you can't have that frenzied-- 189 00:08:30,340 --> 00:08:33,789 There really is a type of frenzy when you're developing an idea with someone. 190 00:08:33,789 --> 00:08:35,380 Like picture it, you're sitting with a group of friends 191 00:08:35,380 --> 00:08:36,909 and you're planning a vacation. 192 00:08:36,909 --> 00:08:38,535 There's a frenziness that exists there. 193 00:08:38,535 --> 00:08:40,409 Or you are sitting with a group of colleagues 194 00:08:40,409 --> 00:08:42,549 and you're trying to solve a problem of access. 195 00:08:42,549 --> 00:08:48,340 And if a group of bright people sharing ideas can feed off one another quickly, 196 00:08:48,340 --> 00:08:52,420 there's a magic aspect to that moment. 197 00:08:52,420 --> 00:08:54,070 And that's the part I'm referring to. 198 00:08:54,070 --> 00:08:57,760 You can create ideas through the long arc of traditional publishing, 199 00:08:57,760 --> 00:09:00,550 but you just don't get that glow of frenzied knowledge 200 00:09:00,550 --> 00:09:05,540 generation that you get when it's open and transparent and connected. 201 00:09:05,540 --> 00:09:08,480 And so then from there I ended up, in 2008, 202 00:09:08,480 --> 00:09:12,680 with a colleague that you know well and have debated many, many times-- 203 00:09:12,680 --> 00:09:13,820 Stephen Downs. 204 00:09:13,820 --> 00:09:15,830 And we created an open online course. 205 00:09:15,830 --> 00:09:17,990 I was at University of Manitoba at the time, 206 00:09:17,990 --> 00:09:21,720 and Brian Alexander and Dave Cormier termed 207 00:09:21,720 --> 00:09:24,260 a MOOC, a massive open online course. 208 00:09:24,260 --> 00:09:27,570 And so we ran that, and we had far more students than we expected. 209 00:09:27,570 --> 00:09:30,470 We ended with 2,300 students, which at that point the term massive-- 210 00:09:30,470 --> 00:09:32,261 I mean nowadays, it's a rounding error when 211 00:09:32,261 --> 00:09:38,315 you look at x and other providers that have far larger populations per course. 212 00:09:38,315 --> 00:09:39,440 But that was the idea then. 213 00:09:39,440 --> 00:09:42,639 It was this sense of you just put it online. 214 00:09:42,639 --> 00:09:43,805 Your idea of the calculator. 215 00:09:43,805 --> 00:09:47,540 It didn't cost us anything to put the content online 216 00:09:47,540 --> 00:09:50,179 that we might have just kept for 20 students previously. 217 00:09:50,179 --> 00:09:52,970 The fascinating thing that arose though was there was an emergent-- 218 00:09:52,970 --> 00:09:54,160 I'll use the word pedagogy. 219 00:09:54,160 --> 00:09:56,360 But there was an emergent pedagogy that happened 220 00:09:56,360 --> 00:10:00,647 where students and others started playing this role of being a teacher. 221 00:10:00,647 --> 00:10:02,480 One section I looked at how long did it take 222 00:10:02,480 --> 00:10:05,630 for someone who posted a comment to have a response or an answer 223 00:10:05,630 --> 00:10:07,460 to that comment in a discussion forum. 224 00:10:07,460 --> 00:10:09,330 We were using Moodle at the time. 225 00:10:09,330 --> 00:10:12,290 And typically it would be within a few hours, maximum. 226 00:10:12,290 --> 00:10:16,850 So when you have 2,300 people, you can't function with just one teacher. 227 00:10:16,850 --> 00:10:20,600 You essentially have 2,300 learners and 2,300 teachers 228 00:10:20,600 --> 00:10:23,810 because someone in that group of 2,300 knew 229 00:10:23,810 --> 00:10:25,360 the answer to anyone else's question. 230 00:10:25,360 --> 00:10:28,610 And if they didn't know the answer, they could debate and dialogue and hash it 231 00:10:28,610 --> 00:10:30,010 apart. 232 00:10:30,010 --> 00:10:34,210 So that was another experience was running this open online course. 233 00:10:34,210 --> 00:10:36,580 And then subsequently, in 2011, I started 234 00:10:36,580 --> 00:10:40,560 getting involved with the data that's produced when we learn online. 235 00:10:40,560 --> 00:10:45,070 And so I sent e-mails to a few colleagues, 236 00:10:45,070 --> 00:10:47,260 and I know you were involved in the conversation, 237 00:10:47,260 --> 00:10:51,340 and enjoyed time in sunny, hot Banff at the end of February. 238 00:10:51,340 --> 00:10:54,580 And it was the first Learning Analytics Conference, 239 00:10:54,580 --> 00:10:57,030 where we really looked at now that we're learning openly 240 00:10:57,030 --> 00:10:58,780 or now at least we are learning digitally, 241 00:10:58,780 --> 00:11:02,530 we're throwing off a lot of data; and what does that data tell us. 242 00:11:02,530 --> 00:11:05,080 The intent of that was again, a spirit of openness, 243 00:11:05,080 --> 00:11:07,570 which is how we make decisions with that data 244 00:11:07,570 --> 00:11:09,580 needs to be as transparent as the content 245 00:11:09,580 --> 00:11:11,960 and the learning interactions are transparent, and so on. 246 00:11:11,960 --> 00:11:14,860 So that's where I ended up with a lot of interest 247 00:11:14,860 --> 00:11:19,720 in learning analytics within MOOCs, with collectivism, with openness. 248 00:11:19,720 --> 00:11:22,600 More recently though, with the work at the Link Research Lab, 249 00:11:22,600 --> 00:11:24,970 I've turned to the broad question of what does 250 00:11:24,970 --> 00:11:27,310 it mean to be human in a digital age. 251 00:11:27,310 --> 00:11:30,010 And that question is really shaped by-- 252 00:11:30,010 --> 00:11:33,760 We're now supposedly entering an age of labor automation. 253 00:11:33,760 --> 00:11:37,510 We're going to have self-driving cars in the next few years 254 00:11:37,510 --> 00:11:40,600 commonly on our highways. 255 00:11:40,600 --> 00:11:44,830 How do we co-exist with the technologies that have cognitive capabilities that, 256 00:11:44,830 --> 00:11:47,050 in many instances, could exceed ours. 257 00:11:47,050 --> 00:11:51,040 And so then it's about what is it to be human in this kind of an age, 258 00:11:51,040 --> 00:11:52,240 in this kind of an era. 259 00:11:52,240 --> 00:11:54,670 And to me, everything is prefaced on our ability 260 00:11:54,670 --> 00:11:57,580 to openly engage with, exchange, and share knowledge. 261 00:11:57,580 --> 00:11:59,890 When things are close, whether it's an algorithm 262 00:11:59,890 --> 00:12:04,660 or whether it is a piece of learning material or learning content, 263 00:12:04,660 --> 00:12:08,380 we sacrifice a little bit of our capability to be active, 264 00:12:08,380 --> 00:12:11,700 involved participants in our own future.