Why is it that we find it difficult to step outside out mindsets? It seems very difficult to change a pattern of thinking once it has been established. We seem rooted in the thinking of the age in which we exist, and this constrains our creativity. This was why Voltaire declared that
'Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time'.
We need creative thinkers. We need people in our society who can break free from the constraints of 'the ideas of the time', and 'think outside the box'. Research in cognitive science reveals to us a great deal about the problem of constrained thinking. In one experiment in problem solving, psychologists showed the image below:
The problem was how to connect all nine dots with just 4 straight lines. The rules of the problem were that the four lines had to be continuous, with no lifting of the pencil from the page. Most participants couldn't complete the problem in the time allocated.
Martin Weller's keynote presentation at EDEN 2015 Conference was entitled 'The battle for open.' A professor of educational technology at the British Open University, he has been an advocate of openness in education for many years, but he expresses doubts over the outcome of the battle. His latest book, also entitled 'The battle for open' carries the strapline 'how openness has won and why it doesn't feel like a victory'. The synopsis reads:
With the success of open access publishing, Massive open online courses (MOOCs) and open education practices, the open approach to education has moved from the periphery to the mainstream. This marks a moment of victory for the open education movement, but at the same time the real battle for the direction of openness begins. As with the green movement, openness now has a market value and is subject to new tensions, such as venture capitalists funding MOOC companies. This is a crucial time for determining the future direction of open education. In this volume, Martin Weller examines four key areas that have been central to the developments within open education: open access, MOOCs, open education resources and open scholarship. Exploring the tensions within these key arenas, he argues that ownership over the future direction of openness is significant to all those with an interest in education.
Clearly, the tensions he identifies require some analysis. In a previous interview I conducted with him, Weller emphasised the idea that openness is a philosophy that can pervade all educational practice. Throughout his keynote presentation in Barcelona, Weller built on this, regularly reminded delegates that openness has been victorious, and we have reached a certain point in the history of education where openness is now mainstream. However, he said, there is a time of tension, where this doesn't yet feel like a victory, and we are now deciding the direction of openness.
His main premise is that we need to be able to define, and understand, the implications of openness in education. What are the core principles of openness? he asked. There is also a battle for narrative raging, where the victor will write the history of openness, he said, continuing the metaphor. Early efforts at openness, including the British Open University, were about removing barriers to study - this university became known as the 'university of the second chance'. The open source movement emerged, with an emphasis on efficiency, and on the rights to use and modify software and tools. Finally, the emergence of Web 2.0 created and encouraged a culture of content sharing. Different elements of this history will resonate with different people he said, so that one definition of openness is problematic.
He traced a brief history of Openness: It starts with a belief in openness that is for the public good - leading to democratisation of knowledge. Then there is resistance to this, because it is unworkable, and low quality. Openness then becomes mainstream, is adapted and adopted by the big companies.
We are now at the stage where at least 50% of academics have published in open access journals (Stats from Wiley), an there is a growth in Open Educational Resources including OER Commons, with many universities now providing free content. There is a rise in open textbooks, where publishing is on demand and open licencing is available. There is a rise in the impact of these research outputs, with open access journals gaining ground in the impact indices. There is the provision of open stats, and data sets are posted online so that anyone can use these data for further research.
Weller talked about the hybrid publications swindle, where publishers charge authors to publish their work and then charge subscribers to read the content - a cynical, 'double dipping' strategy for making money out of the efforts of academics. Weller asked whether the idea of education being broken is now being monetised by the big edu-businesses and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The dominant narrative now is that MOOCs are the technological solution and education is ripe for disruption. The demise of the university has been heralded by people such as Sebastian Thrun, but this is largely a spurious claim, said Weller. This narrative creates a false dichotomy where you are either 'open' or 'closed'. This is unhelpful he argued, because it forces people into extremes of thinking about the web and education in general.
Ultimately, said Weller, the concept of openness allows us to be more creative and to take more risks. Openness is about to move into the mainstream, said Weller, but this is not inevitable. He warned that there is always resistance even once victory has been achieved, and where old frameworks and ways of thinking take a long time to die out. Change happens very slowly, and then come very quickly.
Several of Martin Weller's slidesets are available for free download here.
Photo by Steve Wheeler
Open all hours #EDEN15 by Steve Wheeler was written in Barcelona, Spain and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Among other things, Jim Groom is Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington, USA. I say among other things, because Groom is known more readily for several activities that outshine his day job. He is nicknamed the 'Reverend' (oh the irony), and is a purveyor of American pop culture, experimental educational technology and out-of-left-field philosophy.
Groom's popular and anarchic blog Bavatuesdays is a regular port of call for all those seeking this kind of eclectic and irreverent mashup of concepts, thoughts and opinions. Groom is also responsible for coining the term 'EDUPUNK', a nod to the remixing and do-it-yourself culture that has emerged in recent years in education as a refection of the 1970s punk music scene. He has set up a number of alternative learning experiences, but most notably, his MOOC on digital storytelling, more commonly known as ds106, has had tremendous impact on what we now consider to be possible with global, networked learning.
Listening to Jim Groom speak is a lot of fun. His 'formal' introduction for the event went a little like this:
“Reverend” Jim “The Bava” Groom, alias “Snake Pliskin” is a charlatan and a fraud, a self-confessed “used car salesman” clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit via the efforts of his oppressed minions at the University of Mary Washington’s DTLT and beyond. The monster behind educational time-sink ds106 and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with “Edupunk”, Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap webhosting to gullible undergraduates and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy. (Dave Kernohan).
Not a good start. His keynote speech at EDEN 2015 started in an anarchic, Robin Williams style 'Good morning Barcelona!!' shout.
Groom made several key points around the process of 'uneducation' (a term he borrowed from Brian Lamb) where he talked about 'descent into the maelstrom' - an account of effects of modern networked communication on professional practice. He asked the question 'how do we build an architecture that allows us to aggregate content from across the web and coalesce it in a centralised hub for learners?' Spontaneous network connections, incorporating social media into physical spaces, the use of digital repositories such as Wikipedia, all seemed radical several years ago. Tracing the history of online open learning, Groom talked about MOOCs emerging in 2008, which were about syndication, open networks, and about self organising communities building new practice for the web. He spoke on EDUPUNK and the arrival of 'do-it-yourself' learning where technology brought power to the individual. Education is about the exchange of ideas, and is not about technology, it is about people, he declared.
EDUPUNK was not about dismantling the education system, he said, but about reorganising the space, and about vitalising learning. In 2010, during a class Groom taught at Mary Washington University, Groom began to think about the work on MOOCs and how it could be harnessed to support his students' learning. He created ds106 - digital storytelling where each student would have their own web presence, create their own space, interrogate the web and build their own digital footprint. It was EDUPUNK remixed, but without the inconvenient metaphor. The international community of learning took to this with relish, with creative processes such as Grant Potter's self organised internet radio space, conveniently named ds106 Radio. Over 500 people's blogs were aggregated onto the central ds106 website, and the creativity was supported further. It was an open creative space for everyone within the community.
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| Audrey Watters and Maarten de Laat at EDEN |
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| Audrey Watters and Maarten de Laat |
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| Villemard, c 1910 |
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| Villemard, c 1910 |
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| Barcelona - the home of Gaudi |
With the advent of wearable technology, he mused, will students soon be required to sit their tests naked? It was a throw away remark, and the audience laughed politely, but the underlying thought was quite serious. Should students now be allowed to enter the exam room with devices? (This is a question I also recently posed on this blog) After all, should we be testing their knowledge of facts, or should we be testing their ability to use these facts in particular contexts, such as problem solving and critical analysis of daily activities? Our grading and testing practices, said Mazur, are incompatible with creativity.
I presented a keynote speech in Brisbane for EduTech Australia where the theme for my talk was 'Meet Learner 2.0'. I wanted my audience of mainly higher education teachers to think about the cohort of students that is now coming through the doors of universities. Generally they are young people who have no memory of the last century (the one we were all brought up and educated in), and have been immersed in technology their entire lives. They are younger than the Internet and mobile phones, and they don't recall a time when there was no Google or Facebook. They are residents in the digital age and they carry their connection with them wherever they go. This results in a number of repercussions for education.
We are witnessing a shift in education that is likely to be profound. It is a shift in the roles of teachers and learners, and it is one that will alter the relationships we are familiar with. The shift is occurring in the responsibility that learners are adopting to learn for themselves. Teachers have long been advised to become 'guides on the side' so that learners can take responsibility. From Socrates through to Dewey, far sighted and progressive philosophers and theorists have consistently argued that students learn better when they lead their own discovery. But very few educators ever took up this challenge, preferring instead to remain 'in control' of the process of education, the expert sage taking centre stage. The advent of digital technology challenges this traditional model of education.
A recent post on the Edutopia site contained the following passage:
When a student asked how something was done, we'd play dumb and say, "I don't know. We should probably look it up." The student would look it up, ask another question, and we'd say, "Hmmm. That's interesting. How can we find that out?" Again, the student would go to the book. After enough of those sessions, our students stopped bothering to ask us for the answers -- they already knew all the behaviors that would lead to understanding.
Although this instance is clearly taken from a school context, the same principle applies to all education. If the student has the means to discover for himself, why give him the answer? Hands off teaching does promote metacognition (knowing about knowing). Discovering for yourself tends to deepen the learning experience, and motivates students to go that extra mile, to find out for themselves what the answer is to that question that has been nagging at them. It cultivates curiosity, and curiosity always leads to further questions... and the cycle starts again.
The general behaviours identified by John K. Waters in an article in Education Trends in 2011 seem to be gathering pace, and spawning offshoots: 'New learners' are more self directed, and they are better equipped to capture information with their digital tools. They tend to be more reliant on the feedback from their peers, and they are more inclined to collaborate with each other. In short, they are networked learners. Most significantly, they are more oriented to becoming the nodes of their own production. This means that they produce significantly more content related to their learning than previous generations. The mobile phone in their pocket ensures that this happens, constantly. Because they generate more content and learn from it, they are better placed to drive their own learning. The teacher, acting as a co-learner or co-investigator can scaffold this learning, and acts as a guide rather than an instructor. Working with Learner 2.0 will be quite a challenge for many teachers, particularly those who are ingrained in the old methods of education. But Learner 2.0 is already in your institution, and the opportunities far outweigh the threats.
Photo by JISC
Meet Learner 2.0 by Steve Wheeler was written in Liberec, Czech Republic and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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