Connectivism

Google and Facebook are very different companies. Google has its roots in content – their explicit aim is to organize the worlds information. Facebook, in contrast, is socially driven with the aim of helping “you connect and share with the people in your life”.

The distinction between these two approaches is important for educators to consider, as we face a similar dichotomy in how we approach teaching and learning with technology. Google’s early models viewed information as an entity of inherent worth. As a result, Google made accessing information its top priority, simplifying the disaster of Yahoo search.

But then, in early 2000, something happened: the web became a two-way medium, partly fulfilling Berners-Lee original vision of a read-write web. Google, dominant in the information/data organization space, missed this shift. Sure, they played around with social networking tools (Orkut), but somehow managed to mess up Jaiku, Dodgeball, and JotSpot.

In contrast, Facebook – in error or through brilliant anticipation – based its online model on social connections and information sharing based on those connections. This reality was most apparent for me in 2007 when I started receiving friend requests from family members and friends – people who had shown little interest in the social aspect of the web until that time. Google looked at the web and saw information to organize. Facebook looked at the same web and saw people who needed to be connected.

Facebook’s model is the one that will be successful in the long run.

Google now recognizes this, as reflected in their rapid shift to a social focus of their services: Friend Connect, Latitude, and Social Search. I could add Orkut to the list, but they haven’t made much impact in most countries. Where Google now provides content, it does so through social and contextual means, connecting friends through shared search interests or locations. Friend Connect offers an array of tools for people looking to form and foster connections with others. I’ve been a bit reluctant to use this service extensively because Google has a habit of killing off experiments (Notebook) that aren’t successful.

All is not fun and games in the land of Facebook either. FB is skilled at idiocy, evidenced by Beacon and similar boundary-pushing initiatives that seem to treat people only as entities in need of connection, not as entities with contextual connection interests. Nor am I very comfortable with their privacy contract. Who can trust an organization that can turn this nonsense into a pleasant sounding service?:

Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience.

Really? You’ll do that for me? Aw, thanks Facebook. You are more awesome than awesome itself. Google has launched several positive initiatives recently that are helping to restore my trust – Data Liberation and Google Dashboard. Facebook still functions on the assumption that if we are able to connect with others in innovative ways, we’ll accept, even welcome, privacy intrusion.

The second flaw in Facebook is its centralized, closed structure. Data goes in. Not much comes out. Facebook is a central gathering place that is positioning itself as an alternative infrastructure to the web. Chant with me: “All I need is Facebook. Everything else to too distracting and confusing”. In order to compete, Google has opted for a strategy of openness – open protocols, partnerships (Android), and the like. That has hardly put a dent in Facebook’s growth, currently with over 400 million users. Convenience trumps openness (remember the assent of Microsoft?).

As Google continues to morph into a more open and distributed version of Facebook, educators should pause and focus on insights that can be gleaned from the FB/Google experience. There are several of significant importance for the development and future of online learning.

First: Most organizations currently use a learning management system (LMS) such as Moodle or Desire2Learn. These systems are content-centric. Their objective is to organize and manage content, just as Google did in early 2000. Because higher education is particularly enamored with content, an LMS is a critical service. It’s completely the wrong model, however, and this will become increasingly apparent in the next several years.

To survive, LMS vendors will need to transform their offerings on the social network model of Facebook. ELGG is an excellent alternative to an LMS, but most organizations are not yet willing to accept a network-centric tool as an alternative to Moodle (disclaimer or bragging – you choose: I was on ELGG’s initial advisory board that never fully materialized, and used the software for several pilot programs in 2005 with Red River College and with Duke Corporate Education). ELGG is a better model of what learning will/should look like than any of the current contenders in the space. And yes, for you open-source lovers of Drupal and Wordpress, I include those software tools in the “not as good as” category.

Second: The wild card in education today is abundance. We simply have too much information and we can’t make sense of it all. It changes too quickly. Many universities rely on a “design today, use for three years” course design model. It worked great in 1950. 2009 – not so much. Greater adaptivity of content is required. Learning resources should be tagged with a “best before date” so we’re not teaching information that is no longer accurate. LMS’ perpetuate the course model. And that is their greatest flaw.

Third: Complexity is quickly becoming a type of conceptual language that all members of society should be fluent in. When something is complicated, every piece has a place and a right answer exists. Our education model reflects this view – get the experts together, let them tell us what the answers are, then design curriculum to reflect those answers. It’s all knowable. Complexity, on the other hand, recognizes that numerous interacting elements will form and reform to produce patterns that we can’t anticipate in advance. Complicated=jigsaw puzzle. Complexity=weather.

Fourth: Managing abundance and complexity requires a different view of teaching and learning than currently forms the foundation of education. The content-centric view reflected by LMS’ must be replaced with more adaptive network models. Instead of experts and designers serving as the key sensemaking and wayfinding agents in curriculum, social networks and their ability for context-sensitivity must play a greater role.

If Google and Facebook serve as an example, some degree of transition will be required for both LMS and social networking services (SNS). While Google has adopted greater networking features in the last few years, Facebook has also increased its focus on content (images, videos, etc.). At this stage, however, LMS’ will need to make a far greater transition for long term educational relevance than an SNS like ELGG.

Let’s take a step back and consider how well we are using learning technology in contrast with what is possible given advances over the last decade. Ideologies influence design, then design constrains future options. We don’t have to look very far to see examples of this simple rule: classrooms, design of organizational work activities, politics, and the operation of financial markets.

What we create to survive during one era serves as neurosis for another. In education – particularly in technology enhanced education – a similar trailing of ideologies from another era is observed.

For example, education consultants and speakers commonly declare “if a student from 100 years ago came to our classrooms, she would feel right at home”. Obviously, this is an absurd statement (even if we overlook the challenges of time travel). Education has undergone enormous changes to curriculum, instructional methods, and technologies used. Classrooms today have a more diverse student population, greater attention is paid to the needs of students with special needs, and (for good or bad) students are instructed in different ways of knowing and understanding – in contrast to the singular world views of only 50 years ago. While pundits are wrong in criticizing schools as unchanged in a century, they overlook the more obvious challenge: learning itself is unchanged. Content, student, teacher, interaction (maybe), and assessment; in various combinations, continues to form education’s core.

What are the ideologies reflected in this approach to learning? And do we still need them?

Without going through a painful attempt to deconstruct learning and its systemic origins, I think it’s safe to state the following as the key elements of a weltanschauung that define formal education:

1. We know what students need to know in advance of their arrival (the learning needed can be defined)
2. Through manipulation and sequencing of content and interactions, we can get students to learn what we’ve already decided they need to learn (control)
3. Students at a similar age/grade/program level have a similar knowledge base. Even if we don’t make this explicit, how we design and deliver learning in K-12, university, and corporate settings is evidence that we hold this view. (similarity)
4. Structure, goals, outcomes, and assessment are all good. For that matter, coherence is good. Learning needs a target. (coherence and structure)

Other ideologies exist, but these are particularly influential in education, impacting design to accreditation.

What is wrong with these views?

To return to the opening statement, these views reflect an ideology that is growing in obsolescence in relation to the world outside of classrooms and training labs. When does a student know the structure of a problem in advance of solving it when she’s trying to create a YouTube video? When do a group of children know their learning outcomes when they choose to create and play a game? When does a salesperson know in advance that their is a correct way to engage a foreign client and thereby when the business of their organization? Learning, occurring under contrived conditions in classrooms, bears only a faint resemblance to real world problems and challenges. This is hardly news. Educators have known this for decades. Case studies and problem-based learning were developed partly as a response to the fabricated classroom environment.

Pedagogical innovations, as expressed in constructivism (in its many, many shades), do not provide the full force required to pull away from irrelevant ideologies that seek to warp learning to reflect needs of a different age. This failure to overcome ideologies is due to an inability, to date, of educators to rethink the learning model. Reformers have largely worked within, rather than on, the system of education. Working within the system has resulted in status-quo preservation, even when reformists felt they were being radical. Illich failed to account for how educational institutions are integrated into society. Freire spoke with a humanity and hope that was largely overlooked by a comfortable developed world incapable of seeing the structure and impact of its system. To create and nurture change, a message must not only be true for an era, but it must also resonate with the needs, passions, interests, realities, and hopes of the audience to whom the message is directed. As a result, pedagogy has not influenced learning broadly. It has lifted the spirits and motivations of small camps of educators for brief periods. But it has not altered learning in a way that transforms the system of education.

The externalized generation…

The last decade has provided individuals with the tools to continually externalize their thoughts and ideas. History is generally revealed to us through significant artifacts. We have books (artifact) that capture certain time periods. But we don’t have the raw daily conversation. We have a sanitized view of history. Future generations will likely have access to far more historical information than we currently have. Through Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, SecondLife, podcasts, Flickr, and blogs our daily conversations can be captured. Conversations that occur on Facebook or Twitter do not vaporize the way conversations around a boardroom table do. As both Vygotsky and Wittgenstein argued, language gives birth to thoughts. Twitter gives birth to identity, to being. Technology has enabled our generation to externalize – through video, pictures, audio, text, and simulation – our ideas. Once externalized, a trail of identity and conceptual development is left for future consideration and analysis. (I wrote more on the role of externalization and technology in this paper from 2006 (.doc))

Finding a cure for stale ideologies

Instead of working within the system of teaching and learning, let’s turn our attention to changing the system itself by suggesting responses to the ideologies discussed previously:

1. The learning needed can be defined
2. Control is needed to achieve required learning
3. Students at similar stages need similar learning
4. Coherence and structure needed for learning

French philosophers (always blame the French…but the Germans contributed their share as well) have lead us to relativistic views that could be used as a method for challenging these four ideologies. This would provide hours of fun, but with little practical outcome. The development of chaos and complexity theory offer another approach, but models in the physical sciences are often only useful as metaphors in the social sciences.

Education has had enough theorizing (yes, I get the irony). Let’s throw in a dash of pragmatics and see where we end up. In fact, let’s start at the smallest element in the learning process: a connection. Instead of trying to squeeze curriculum into a myriad of epistemological views and adding a splash of psychology and sociology, I suggest we zero in on connections. Biologically, learning is as simple as the firing of neurons. At a conceptual level, learning involves the connecting/weighting/strengthening of links between concepts and ideas. At a social level, learning involves interacting with other individuals (and increasingly, technological agents). How are connections formed? What does a particular constellation of connections represent? How important is technology in enabling connections? What, if anything, is transferred during an interaction between two, three, or more learners? What would learning look like if we developed it from the world view of connections?

Introducing [something that I haven't named yet]

Here’s the basic concept: technological advances in how content is created and how individuals interact are at a sufficient stage to serve as a replacement to traditional classrooms. Enter Technologically Externalized Knowledge and Learning (TEKL). Or Connector. Or Learnometer. Or learnalyzer. Or Learnabler. Or future learning approach. I have no idea what to call it without evoking the cheesy Batman “pow” images and shark repellant from the 70’s. For know, I’ll stick with the acronym TEKL.

What is TEKL? TEKL is a physical, wearable device that captures our physical and virtual interactions and assist us in recognizing and forming knowledge connections based on our past interactions, our social network, and our current work or personal interest needs. The image below expresses the elements of TEKL and provides additional detail on the function of various agents.:

Technologically Externalized Knowledge and Learning

Components of TEKL:

Profile: Our profile is essentially our identity online. We can contribute to the formation of our identity by completing profile pages on Facebook, our organizational social network or directory (i.e. IBM’s Blue Pages), or Google Profile. However, our identity and profile will be shaped by what others say about us online and by the indirect messaging evident in the types of people we connect with (i.e. if 90% of your friends are of a certain political or religious view, the probability of your politics/religion being similar is high). The portion of our profile that we control (i.e. what we say about ourselves) could be used for TEKL to suggest social (geographic) connections at conferences or other venues. Google Latitude – and numerous other services that map profile/social network to geographical location – is an example of what an early prototype of this service might look like. The intent of the profile feature of TEKL is simply to make available certain aspects of ourselves for connecting with other people and with information. Over time, our profile is augmented with additional information extracted from our patterns of interaction. Eventually, the trails left in our interactions and in our word/language use will enable TEKL to know us well enough to provide general guidance and direction (counseling?)

Patterning Agent: The patterning agent provides metrics, feedback, and visualization. How many words have I spoken today? How did I develop conceptually today (concepts are address by a separate agent – more on that below)? If I’m seeking accreditation in a particular field, how much progress was made? How do the ideas I addressed today match against ideas I’ve expressed in the past (my profile). Essentially, this agent visualizes our social networks and our interactions with others, providing insight into our knowledge and learning habits.

Discovery Agent: The discovery agent actively solicits additional information based on our current context and our social network. For example, if I sent an email to a colleague three weeks ago addressing, say, the headaches I have with my investment banker, the discovery agent would continually “seek” opportunities to connect me with individuals who have related patterns of communication (say a colleague in my social network who has a great investment banker). My communication and information patterns are constantly matched with those in my social network. Connections are recommended that I may not have noticed on my own. The discovery agent also serves as “constant Google” role, providing new and updated information based on previous emails, texts, tweets, phones calls, web searches, courses, and conversations. This agent can provide a valuable role when activated at an organizational level – i.e. “George, a colleague in UK is displaying similar patterns of conversations, would you like to connect with her?”. Privacy, obviously, is a huge concern here. Does the organization own our words and interactions? (by offering suggestions for interactions, our work habits would be made explicit, analyzed, and then matched).

Matching Agent: The matching agent analyzes an individual’s conceptual development. This requires that all of our interactions and conversations are first recorded. If a field has been well defined, a matching agent can make recommendations to information and social connections that would provide value for our learning. If I decide I want to be a nurse or an accountant, I can load the attributes of this work-type into TEKL and it would provide continual information and social recommendations to help me “become” a nurse or accountant.

Monitoring Agent: The monitoring agent works closely with the matching agent. It essentially serves as an “overlay” agent, determining progress toward our goals. With the profile of a particular career fully loaded, I could see regular indications of progress toward the requirements accrediting bodies allocate to that field. And, when I’m done being an accountant, and decide I want to be a carpenter, this new work-type can be installed into TEKL and my existing competencies and conceptual understandings can be measured against my new career. Instead of duplicating my learning as I change careers, I’m only required to develop those skills and conceptual elements that I’m still missing.

Mentor/Guide: The mentor/guide aspect of TEKL is the human/social function. When we decide to explore a new field, we may wish to have the value of a human guide, sharing personal stories and recommending approaches to our own learning and knowledge growth. E-harmony and other online dating services have altered how people date and find partners. TEKL offers a similar learner/teacher connecting service. Our profile is matched with educators/instructors, suggesting ideal relationships for learning.

As we go through the day, TEKL merrily records, matches, monitors, and recommends our learning and knowledge needs. When we go to bed, TEKL process our conversations (verbal – after all, everything is recorded), our email, our work habits, and our information seeking activities. Then, when we wake up, we receive a learning and knowledge status report, providing us with intelligent and relevant information as well as recommendations for greater personal efficiency and critical sources of information. The is a daily personal knowledge and learning GPS that provides direction and progress.

How does this move the field of learning forward?

How does this overcome the ideologies that education has to date been unable to shed through pedagogical reform?

First, given nature of today’s complex problems – we have hit the limits of cognition in the head. We need to rely on the network as a cognitive agent. Solving the biggest problems of humanity will require a pedagogy built on networks and the distributed knowledge amplification opportunities they allow.

Second, it pushes learning into the background. Rather than saying “I am learning now” – a nonsensical statement as we are constantly learning – it makes what we’ve learned explicit only after learning, rather than before (i.e. “learning outcomes”). Where the learning is undesirable (a misconception, for example), feedback is provided through both social networks and through conceptual patterns analysis.

Third, it accounts for the complexity of learning by permitting learning needs to be formed and reformed based on current needs and context. The learner is, in the much abused term, “in control”. Learning as foraging.

Fourth, instead of squeezing all students into a curricular path that ignores individual distinctions, students are continually provided personalized (ugh) content and connection suggestions.

Fifth, the coherence and structure of learning is not solid and fixed as in a course. Instead, coherence is continually shaped and formed as new connections are suggested, existing conceptual networks are challenged (by social networks and patterning software). Structure is a by product of learning processes, used to evaluate quality of learning in relation to some other entity (say, the competence and knowledge to be a nurse or a business person or a plumber). Where no ulterior motives – such as accreditation – are sought, evaluation is not a significant concern.

The real issue

The real issue is not related to technology. It’s the conceptual jump that’s most difficult. For example, the functionality expressed in TEKL exists in various tools already. The key value produced by TEKL is to connect the pieces in a meaningful manner that allows for personalization, utilization of social networks, exploration of patterns, and layering of “knowledge and skills” over an existing profile to offer new learning opportunities.

Different areas of research and entertainment – such as language analysis, data visualization, social network analysis, matching services on Amazon, friend suggestions on LinkedIn – have made significant inroads analyzing and matching information based on context and need. TEKL is, in a sense, a connecting agent drawing together proved functionally various fields and directing this connected structure in the service of learning and knowledge growth.

Utah State University has announced the closure of its OpenCourseWare initiative due to budget woes. I call nonsense (or BS). Apparently OCW needed $120,000 per year. Given the size of Utah State University, I’m going to guess they have an annual operating budget somewhere in the range of $300-400 million. This is not a budget shortfall – this is a commitment shortfall. 120K is a fraction of a fraction in light of the larger university budget.

This illustrates my concern about centrally organized open educational initiatives – they have a single point of failure: funding. There is a solution. It’s called systematization.

Let’s consider lowriders (the cars/trucks, not the jeans). I’m not into lowriders. This is mainly due to my general lack of being cool. But it is also partly due to how people react to after market modifications. When I buy a new vehicle, I like things to be fairly painless. Air conditioning? Yes. Power windows? Yes. (can you even get new cars without those options?). Satellite radio? Yes. However, if the salesperson stated it would take a few weeks to months to get specific features like GPS, I would likely pass. Why? Because certain options are not really options. They are cast as additional features, but in reality, we expect them as part of our vehicles. These options have been systematized into the development of the vehicle.

Lowriders, on the other hand, are true after market vehicles. Expensive customization is the general rule here. Which means if you didn’t buy your vehicle as a lowrider, there’s a very slim chance you’ll get it customized. A small fraction of society will pay for this extra work.

What does this have to do with Utah State?

Everything. The OER and OCW movement(s) are fundamentally flawed in where they assign openness. Openness is being treated as separate from curriculum development and delivery. Openness is viewed as an after market feature. And most universities aren’t too eager to pay for the extras.

Openness should be built into the process of curriculum design – it should be systematized just like so-called options of air conditioning and power windows in vehicles. As long as openness is separated from the rest of education, it will be seen as a cost-cutting option. Which is really rather silly. The 0.034% savings to Utah’s budget this year reveals the precarious position open education holds when treated as an optional add on…

David Wiley posted a concern about feeling out of place at the OpenEducation Conference in Vancouver last week. Since he started the conference four years ago, his sense of disconnection from the zeitgeist of the event is interesting. In particular, he’s concerned about the radicalization of education. I tried to post a response last night…but his site informed me it was a “duplicate post” (whatever that means). If I can’t use Wiley’s microphone, guess I’ll use my own here. This is the comment I tried to post:

Hi David,

Interesting post. I remember reading something about you proclaiming the end of universities by 2020 if they don’t change…and even offering your own certificates for course completion. Or perhaps I’ve read about you in a recent Fast Company article on higher education transformation. How radical of you!

A few somewhat random, but loosely connected, comments:

I share your concern about some of the conversations occurring in the edtech field (I think it’s broader than the OpenEd conference) relating to the role of universities. Thinking on educational reform is increasingly radical (ok, maybe it’s been radical for decades – i.e. Illich, Freire, and even Dewey). A good bit of radical thinking can be healthy, as long as it is radical thinking directed at the right object at the right time and in the right manner.

Experiences like you detail here are great for clarifying what a person actually believes. Sometimes I think I believe something…but, as I face the logical outcome of a world organized on those principles, I often find I pull back and rethink (or moderate).

At the opening of our policy meeting at OpenEd09, I mentioned that I was concerned we were going to become “Stallman” if we did not find a way to begin to speak at the power table. A group of bloggers and grassroots movements will not re-create the education system. Why? Integrated systems (networks of networks) are very difficult to change. Universities as we know them today will continue to play a role because of their tight integration to the power structures of society. In this instance, I think we need to “play within” the system in order to enact change.

However, and this gets to our conversation in your previous post, not all aspects of education are integrated in a networked manner. When an aspect of education is linearly integrated (like textbook publishing), significant disruption can occur without impacting the system of education. If all textbook content was made available in digital form, would we really suffer? I think not.

Now, to turn to your discussion of confusing means and ends, OERs are a lever of change. (I addressed university-level change in relation to OERs here as a post-OpenEd reflection: http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=151). Education is concerned with information creation/exchange. As Frank and Gabler argue, universities map the reality of the society in which they exist. As we begin to do new things with information, we also need to begin to shape our institutions differently. Higher education is in a period of rebalancing. I recently read a UNESCO report (.pdf) (pre-reading for the world conference on future of HE in France) that explored the dimension of change impact universities: globalization, technology, internationalization, research agendas, etc. Change is in the air.

While highly integrated systems don’t disappear overnight, they do change and evolve. Consider the growth of international education in Australia. Education is their 2nd or 3rd (depending on which report you look at) largest export. Entire university systems (King Abdullah University) are being built from scratch for a few meager billion. World Bank, UNESCO, OECD, and other international agencies, have turned their attention to the “virgin forest” (Fast Company quote) of HE.

I think we will see radical change in parts of education. I’m not sure where we’ll see radical change and where we’ll see evolutionary change. Teaching is the most obvious area of dramatic change given the communicative aspect of technology development. Online learning is a viable option (EDUCAUSE and Sloan-C support this development…as does the report released by US Dept of Education a few weeks ago) to classroom only learning.

The research roles of universities, on the other hand, are well integrated into society. Accreditation also continues as an important role for universities to play in society. For now at least, these two roles of universities is fairly secure in society.

In my youth, I went on a silent spiritual retreat. Days without speaking – except for ~1 hour each day with a spiritual adviser. On day 3, he made a statement that has guided much of my thinking since: never move away from something – you never know where you’ll end up…always walk toward something – this ensures you end up where you want to be. If we desire to do away with universities because we think they are obsolete (and in many ways, they are), we really don’t know what the future will look like. Change is about moving toward what we desire. But many reform advocates are not really clear on this yet. For that matter, I’ll direct the question to you: What type of higher education system are you moving toward? What are you working to achieve?

I’m quickly turning into a curmudgeonly whiner.

Last week I was busy complaining about the flaws in existing open education models and how current activities a) fail to give educators a seat at the policy/power table and b) will, in the long run, hurt the socially conscious ideals many reform advocates strongly support.

If we are to have change, we might as well have the right kind of change. If we are going to expend energy envisioning a new world of education, we might as well be bold, creative, and future-focused. After all, good change and bad change require roughly the same amount of effort. Might as well pursue the highest ideals we are capable of forming.

All ideas need critique. When I encounter a new concept such as Flatworld Knowledge or open educational resources in general, I soon turn to exploring the critiques. If critiques are not available, I (naturally) wonder why. Not many things are “all good”. With connectivism, for example, I’ve sought out and highlighted people who disagree with what I’ve written on the subject. A theory or concept is only as good as the rigor to which it has been subject.

Let’s talk publishing.

Last year, with much attention, Flatworld Knowledge announced a new approach to textbooks.

I’ll start nitpicking: I don’t like the term Flatworld. As a concept it is obviously tied to Friedman’s text and has the air of hype. When I hear flat world references, I become critical of attached concepts. Why build a company on a buzzword that has been aptly criticized by Richard Florida? But this is a petty complaint. If the company is innovative and offers a new model, the name isn’t that consequential. Eventually it’ll be reduced to FWK Publishing (i.e. the KFC approach – when “fried” food became a health concern, the initials will do just fine).

But is the approach innovative?

On the surface, it appears to be. Learners can read the textbook online (though in an intentionally small window that makes reading unpleasant), or – for a fee – download for-print and audio versions as well as purchase a physical copy. Educators can customize (still in beta with the text I tried) textbooks by rearranging chapters and sections and adding annotations.

FWK textbooks are written by experts. Educators adopting texts can be reasonably assured of quality. Authors get paid. Students get a low cost text. Everyone wins. I think it’s a great model and I think it will succeed. More publishers will adopt this model. It’s almost inevitable.

But FWK will succeed for the wrong reasons. It will succeed because it tweaks the existing model of textbooks just enough to disrupt publishers, but not enough to disrupt the industry as a whole. FWK is integrated into the system of education: authors, bookstores, faculty, and students. It uses existing reward metrics (recognition and a little bit of revenue for the author) and addresses the biggest complaint students have about textbooks: costs.

Essentially, the existing system is used as the infrastructure for FWK model. And that’s the problem. I don’t believe we need the publisher as a mediator.

What is and what ought to be

TMI: I grew up in a very religious community. As an immigrant to Canada, I was taught (by my parents and the broader church community) that progress was inherently bad. Technology – computers in particular – were leading us to the end times. I grew up without television, radio, and many of the worldly tools/devices available to my peers.

I don’t regret my upbringing. It forms who I am as a person. One church-inspired lesson that has always stuck with me is the way in which the greater good (idealism) is manifest in practical daily grinds. Jesus, for example, calls his followers to impossibly high standards in Matthew 5-7 (Sermon on the Mount). How can a human being possibly live up to that high a calling?

The high standards serve as a target. The Greek word for sin (Hamartano) means to “miss the mark”. The pursuit of highest standards is important, in this line of reasoning, for the people we become through the process of longing to attain high ideals, not for the standard itself.

Bringing my religious background together with my technological life produces a similar appeal for high idealism. Mark Pilgrim’s rant about open enough is instructive: we too often accept open enough resources out of convenience rather than out of long term considerations.

This is a central conflict in web 2.0 vs. open source. Web 2.0 has few of the ideals of the open source movement. For many users, this is fine – free is the desirable trait. Monetarily free is not without cost. When Google decides a product is no longer valuable, it shuts it down (Notebook, Jaiku, JotSpot). When financial conditions change, companies holding our data suddenly disappear.

With regard to educational reform, our thinking should be future-focused. What is the impact of FKW? Is there a better way? Can we reduce costs and promote openness in an anti-textbook model? What could that possibly look like?

Convenient Change vs Principled Change

When trying to change a complex integrated system that includes numerous stakeholders – such as universities – a seat is required at the power table. Higher education is integrated into national competitiveness strategies, democratic societies, and corporate success/viability. Multiple stakeholders require engagement with all stakeholders in order to craft change. Grassroots revolutions are not of sufficient momentum to transform universities. The system is too integrated (i.e. a networked integration – systems of systems) and serves too many roles to be changed from single tension points.

When trying to disrupt a field – such as happens regularly with technology (iPod, Google Docs) – a brilliant idea is sufficient in itself. While systems like textbook publishing are integrated, the integration is within the system itself, not with other systems.

That sounds counter intuitive. I’ll clarify. Textbooks are systemically integrated in that the relationship between author/publisher/teacher/student is linear. It’s not a network integration (systems of systems). The student needs the textbook only because the educator does. Loose networked integration means commitment to the process wanes as the product moves down the line. When authors no longer need textbook publishers, the game is over.

Google is a company that understands systemic integration quite well. The prospect that I will abandon Google for another service diminishes as my use of their offerings becomes more and more integrated (Android, Latitude, Docs, iGoogle, Gmail, Reader, search, Blogger). Integrated webs create committed (locked in?) customers. Linear integration – where each entity down the line depends only on decision of the previous entity and the connections are not mutually enforcing – produce weak loyalty. I’ll abandon an email client (Hotmail, Yahoo) for a better service if it’s not integrated with other software.

Time to tie a few of these ideas together: textbook publishing is a weakly integrated field. The model itself is ripe for innovation. FWK will be successful because it tweaks enough of the system to keep the linear integration in tact, but not enough to disrupt the field itself. Perhaps we should pursue a more visionary approach – one that is tied to high ideals and provides the greatest number of future options.

Change that preserves and extends future options

I like the Wikibook and Wiki Educator models.

An evaluation (.pdf) of Wiki Educator states the site produced “71 Book equivalents…during 1 January 2008 to 30 June 2009″. The drawback? These resources are not always coherent. Scientific American explores the challenges of the “everyone contributes” model: “While the real power of open-source textbooks, Bridges and others say, is being able to tap into the knowledge of the nation’s 3 million schoolteachers, a look at the recent crop of books suggests that’s not an accurate reflection of how educational content is being created. So far, the front-runners were typically written by just one or several authors…” (remember the We Are Smarter book initiative? The goal was to have many people write the text. It failed. In the end, traditional authorship (two authors, I believe) produced the book).

It appears that we value collaboration more in principle than we do in practice.

David Wiley suggests that the “wiki way” = poor quality. Why do we collaborate less than our rhetoric suggests…and when we do collaborate, produce resources of (arguably) lower quality?

Perhaps we produce lower quality resources through collaboration because we are not used to writing together. Perhaps it’s because the reward system encourages egoistic publication. Perhaps it’s human nature. I don’t think War & Peace would be the same quality resource if it had been written by a network. But I really don’t know that for sure. I don’t think it has been tried often enough to be found wanting. I think it has been left largely untried.

Simply stating that collaborative projects have to date not produced the quality of resources that has been produced under the traditional authorship model is not satisfactory. Benkler’s assertion that (.pdf) module granularity and integration challenges are antagonistic to the wiki model (p. 22) is valid (at least he added “at present” in his argument ). However, as a culture of remix takes hold beyond a few early adopters, it’s reasonable to expect granularity integration to be less restrictive than it currently is seen to be. Perhaps a move from tecno brega to edu-brega?

It’s too early to convincingly declare select-authorship models of textbooks to be superior to wiki-created textbooks. Or, if we do make the declaration (as Wiley, Benkler and others have done), we need to focus on understanding why. It seems wrong to declare that connected intelligence is not capable of achieving the same level of quality as individual intelligence.

The need for collaboration is amplified by the growing complexity of information. As Kress and Pachler (.pdf) have stated: “What we have here is a transition from a stable, settled world of knowledge produced by authority/authors, to a world of instability, flux, of knowledge produced by the individual.” Single author models are not capable of innovating rapidly enough, or for that matter, providing a broad enough perspective of a subject.

If scientific research, development of art and literature, the internet, and the web all attest to the value of integration/connection/collaboration, I’m inclined to suggest the problem is not with wiki-textbooks, but instead with how we are approaching them. Something is wrong in our model of implementation, not with the model of creation.

Final Thoughts

When I first started thinking on this subject, I was quite negative on FWK. Having reviewed their site and their model in more detail, I’m less extreme in my views. FWK is an important advancement for textbooks. Many students this fall will be rather pleased at the reduced costs (though the books on the site are primarily confined to business and finance – another drawback: mediators seek areas of highest return first) of FWK texts.

The concept is open enough to keep many revolutionaries at bay (isn’t that often the main intent of partial change? provide enough change to satisfy the slightly less peripheral agitators? Staged or transitional change often plays a negative role in this regard. Partial change now pushes substantial change into the future). The idea is good enough to make investors quite happy – see open textbooks gaining ground. In this regard, I wish FWK well. It is an important contribution.

Now, if we can just find a way to make the pursuit of highest ideals (open & collaboratively produced textbooks produced by communities/networks of vested participants in this case) as rewarding (or compelling) as the pursuit of ‘good enough’.

I’m at Open Education 2009 in Vancouver. I’m enjoying the conference, in particular meeting up with many, many colleagues and friends. Much credit is due to the conference organizers: Scott Leslie, Chris Lott, Brian Lamb, and David Wiley.

A well-promoted pre-conference event included a dialogue with Stephen Downes and David Wiley (recordings – all six hours – can be accessed here). I wasn’t able to attend the session, but managed to catch a good portion of it via ustream. The conversation covered a large landscape: roles of teachers, self-directed learning, copyright, creative commons licenses, the role of liberal education in society, etc.

Reactions to the event varied (here and here). Open educational resources (OERs) are shifting to mainstream. When you have two early leaders (Wiley and Downes) the conversation can be expected to include a mix of idealism, philosophy, and technical details. My sense, as I listened to the presentation, was that the conversation needs to morph to better account for the interests of those who are only now entering the world of OERs. Downes and Wiley were largely speaking to “their own” – a group that is shrinking as a percentage of those who are interested in OERs.

Time to whine

I’m increasingly dismayed at the quality of thinking with regard to educational reform. OERs are, rightly I think, tied to reform. Opening up content is only a starting point. What does higher education look like when all content is freely available? Which systems of instruction and learning will we need to change? What will accreditation look like? The quality of discussion on this topic is not in proportion to the weight of the subject. I hear too many references to pop-psychology thinking (and am then accused of being elitist).

The importance of university reform should call us to do our best thinking.

But, what is the response by our community and quasi-researchers like Don Tapscott (see The Impending Demise of the University)?

Primarily rhetoric with a blend of nonsensical proclamations. Universities aren’t going anywhere. They are not going to disappear. Recent UNESCO (here and here) and World Bank publications (here) speak to the centrality of universities in international competitiveness.

Governments look to universities as the first pledge to participating in a knowledge economy. When governments want solutions to the big problems facing humanity, they turn to universities: global warming, H1N1, youth crime, addiction, nanotechnology, AIDS crisis, intolerance, and many others.

Are learners numbers decreasing? No. Higher education enrollment is steadily increasing (currently over 150 million). The next billion people to earn a degree will do so largely in universities and they will largely be from developing countries.

Universities – especially as research institutions – are centrally integrated structures, vital to democratic societies. They are staying.

What about the teaching dimension? Can the teaching function of universities be replaced by social networks, communities and alternative accreditation models? Absolutely. And, to a degree, it’s inevitable.

Managed and organized? Or chaotic, loosely joined?

During a lunch discussion on policy, the challenges were made clearer to me. Two views were presented: work within the existing system or create a secondary system. This tension is one that I’ve felt for quite a while (see this article from 2003), but it seems to be intensifying.

I would love to see courses more become more distributed and fragmented. Current conceptions of courses should be destabilized (or have a look at the online conference we hosted earlier this year: From Courses to Dis/Course). Classroom walls are useless.

Learning consists of weaving together coherent (personal) narratives of fragmented information. The narrative can be now created through social sensemaking systems (such as blogs and social networks), instead of centrally organized courses. Courses can be global, with many educators and participants (i.e. CCK08).

Courses, unlike universities, are not directly integrated into the power system of a society. Can decentralized networks of autonomous agents serve the same function as organized institutions?

But who loses, and what is lost, if the teaching role of universities decline?

Surprisingly, those people who are most active in advocating for the demise of the universities are the ones who will lose the most if it actually happens. I can’t provide exact statistics (though I know they exist), but liberal arts education is in decline – with the odd bump in increased enrollment, followed by decline again. Engineering, science, and technology have more funding and momentum than humanities and social sciences. Our world is becoming one of numbers, algorithms, and data. And of utilitarianism. Research=commercialization.

The biggest loser in the demise of universities would be socialism. I recognize that this sounds inherently contradictory – i.e. how can giving individuals control possibly equate with a loss of control collectively? Socially conscious thinking flourishes in universities like it does in no other public venue. The utilitarian focus of corporations has little tolerance for the more speculative discourse that occurs withing universities.

If universities are largely reduced to research institutions, the power balancing role of universities will suffer. Society is upheld by numerous pillars: government, religion, business/economics, and education. I’m not yet convinced that fragmenting the education pillar will result in a stronger, more just, more sustainable society. And, I am reluctant to support the notion that the remaining pillars of society will be able to absorb the pivotal role that universities currently serve.

Societies power pillars listen to each other. To have a seat at the table is to have a voice in policy and to have a greater prospect of influence. The argument can be made that government is comprised of people and therefore the values of a society will be preserved through democratic elections. So, even if education as an institution becomes distributed and fragmented, the will of the people will be reflected through general elections.

This view reflects a very idealistic orientation and largely ignores human nature. Many information structures are fragmenting – newspaper, music, movies – and many reform advocates suggest that distributed networks can do what organized structures have done in the past (such as Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head and through the network (of networks)). But the Second Superpower did not stop the war in Iraq. And the fifth estate Dutton proclaims has not yet proven itself to be sustainable other than for event-based functions – such as electing Obama. Once the task is done, the networks focus shifts. Obama would really like his network back now, I imagine, as he tackles health care reform. But the network arose only to serve a task (elect Obama). The constellation of factors required to activate the network to reform health care has not yet emerged. Hierarchical “government as usual” will have to attend to health reform.

The virtues that a society finds desirable are systematized in its institutions. However futile this activity, it helps society, and media, to hold people accountable, to devise strategies, and create laws so people feel safe. Similarly, results that are desirable (financial, educationally, etc) are systematized to ensure the ability to manage and duplicate results. I shared some thoughts on this systematization last year as a reason for the currently limited impact of personal learning environments (PLEs). Quite simply, even revolutionaries conserve.

Capitalism needs Marx

I have not encountered an effective and considered response to OERs. It’s not a situation where everyone wins. Openness has costs. Capitalism needs a Marx. Russell (or more broadly, philosophy) needs a Wittgenstein. OERs currently suffer from cute kitten syndrome – it seems almost unethical to have a negative stance. Scott Leslie has captured a few existing critiques, but I’d like to see greater analysis of impact. And to shift the discussion from “things are changing” to analysis of “what we are becoming”.

/Time to whine

I support openness. I support OERs (though I think the “resources” focuses too much on content and ignores the pedagogical dimensions of connecting with other learners). The research role of universities, due to its integration with government and policy, will morph and change, but will not disappear. Teaching is what is most at risk. Can a social network – loosely connected, driven by humanistic ideals – serve a similar role to what university classrooms serve today? I hope so, but I don’t think so. At least not with our current mindsets and skillsets. We associate with those who are similar. We do not pursue diversity. In fact, we shy away from it. We surround ourselves with people and ideas that resonate with our own, not with those that cause us stress or internal conflict.

Secondly, until all of society becomes fully networked (not technologically networked, but networked on the principles of flows, connections, feedback), a networked entity always risks being subverted by hierarchy. Today, rightly or wrongly, hierarchy holds power in society.

Quick announcement: We (Stephen Downes and I) are again offering Connectivism and Connective Knowledge in September 2009. Sign up for the non-credit version of the course here. If you are interested in taking the course for-credit as part of University of Manitoba’s Certificate in Emerging Technologies for Learning, more information is also available.