Category: archives

From the Archives: 2008 Hyper Optimism about MOOCS

I found a REALLY old one full of the hope and optimism of 2008. Leaving it as is, with just the addition of cheerful flowers. I want to feel optimism again!

image of 5 colorful imaginary flowers on a light cream background.

I should be doing a hundred other things than blogging at 8:30 at night. No wonder I have weird dreams. But I really wanted to jump into the flow of posts and conversations about Massive, Open, Online Courses or MOOC’s.

I’m referring to Stephan Downes’ and George Siemen’s generous offering, “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge”, a twelve week, open offering they are getting ready to launch. No small feat. For anyone who has ever designed and offered an online collaborative learning event, it is a lot of work. An act of love. (Yes, Stephen, LOVE!) But what happens when 1200 people want to play? This reminds me of the lovely conundrum Leigh Blackall is in with 90 people signing up for his Facilitating Online Communities course. It is raising all kinds of fun questions about how to scale social learning.

So, can a ‘course’ scale to 1200 people as a social, connected learning event? What does that look like? How do we set our expectations? While Stephen and George are creating a course (see this page) I suspect that something wholely different will be experienced by many. It is a delicious set of possibilities and challenges. I’d like to question if it is even a ‘course’ in the way we have come to understand the word. Of course, with academic institution sponsorship, one can understand the name, but what I think this is is a Massive Online Learning Happening (MOLH!). Or a Massive Online Learn Fest (MOLF!). Or maybe a Massive Love-Learn-In. (MILLI!)

Seriously, this is networked learning.  But what a great learning edge to find out what happens when you really OPEN the doors.

Thanks to Stephen and George’s course blog, we’ll have a line of sight in to the action, even if we aren’t able to jump into the actual event. (I confess, the thought of it alone kind of makes me tired!)

So here are my questions:

  • How much will end up being about content delivery, how much about meaning making through individual reflection (especially evidenced in this case by blog posts) and how much will be socially constructed through interaction and meaning making between people (reading and commenting on other blogs, shared creation on the wiki and conversation in whatever conversation spaces crop up).
  • What are the implications of such a large group and the large possibility that they will have wildly different experiences — will what they learn be wildly different? Does that matter?
  • What are the implications of those paying for credit and support? How do they feel about “sharing” the course with 1000 other people?
  • What is the impact on the learning facilitators? Will the size of the group push them back to the traditional role of information providers? Will they only interact with the paid participants? Will they get any sleep for 12 weeks????
  • How does this compare/is this related to what we know about other types of online events?

Associations Should Consider the MOOC | Mission to Learn
I suspect I don’t really even need to spell out how the MOOC model could be of value in the association sector. Or for nonprofits hoping to engage a large group of stakeholders around a cause. Or for businesses seeking greater engagement with their customer base.

Just taking associations as the main example, imagine bringing together a significant slice of your audience online – member and non-member – over a period of days, weeks, or even months to engage on a topic that is central to their day-to-day work. Not just an online conference with a line up of presenters – plenty of that has already been done with widely mixed results. Rather, an event that is truly facilitated, in which key thought leaders help evoke shepherd audience input and participation, taking advantage of social media-driven Learning 2.0 approaches.

The potential seems tremendous. And not just for professional development or continuing education. I sincerely hope this idea will not be relegated to that. This is the stuff of missions.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of what Siemens and Downes are doing will not even be the course itself – though I have no doubt that will be incredibly valuable, and I plan to participate – but rather observing the thinking and processes by which the course comes about. Siemens and Downes have been documenting their efforts on the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge blog, and have also engaged in at least one podcast interview so far on EduTech Talk.

From the Archives: Visual and Audio “Getting Into Online meetings” Ideas

Back in 2020 and 2021 some of my friends and colleagues refused to get stuck in the same-old, same-old of starting meetings online. Fisher Qua showed me a Music Labs experimental tool and playing with it (in this clip) opened possibilities of co-creating visually and aurally that could start a meeting in a way that immediately changed our participation and experience.

A bit wild, sure, but why do we seek so much to maintain the status quo? Why do we snap back to the safe, predictable, without even considering if it is still useful? Time for more creative destruction. Make space for something that is more useful. What meeting starting habits have you creatively destroyed? What new practices emerged from that space you created?

From the Archives: Are technology and process configuration patterns enough?

In 2009 Etienne Wenger (now Etienne Wenger-Trayner), John D. Smith and I published the culmination of lots and lots of thinking about how to use technology to support groups and communities. Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities was our way of trying to make sense of the tech landscape so that communities could provision their tech without having to be a total technologist.

In my archive of drafts was this post with just one paragraph:

What are the patterns of interaction over time, what are the configurations of technology over time,  and are these distinct enough patterns so that we can simply template the tech and process, or do these change enough with and every interaction?  And we need to know how to do that. 

With the rebirth of virtual and hybrid work, this is again a useful question, even if I can’t figure out what I meant with the last sentence! 🙂

Let me give an example of why this fascinates me. 

We have a group of people who need to work/learn/do something together. At the minimum these days they have Zoom or some other synchronous video meeting tool. Most groups also have a shared document space. For what types of work is this minimal tech configuration (set of tools and how they are used) sufficient? Is there a pattern that says “simple configuration is all you need?”

If the simple configuration is adequate, what types of group need trigger more tech tools and processes? For example, we used to think that groups distributed across diverse time zones needed asynchronous communication tools in addition to the sync (video) and content sharing. 

If a group has more complicated content needs, do they need more tools for the creation, curation and sharing of content? What triggers this next level of need?

If a group is handed a very complicated technology configuration right off the bat (our corporate platform!!) that has more tools and features than the group needs, what impact does this have upon their work? Will they reduce their efficacy messing around and tripping on the tech? Fully ignore the platform? Invent whole new ways of using the tech?

Do you see what I’m getting at… there are both stable patterns AND lots of ways to subvert the patterns. So my question is, is it worth spending time to develop the patterns at all, or just let things emerge? When? Why? (I do NOT have the answer. Just the curiosity!) Oh, I see Ton is also writing about this!

By the way, if you are still reading, I discovered a box of Digital Habitats books in my basement. If you would like a copy and are in the US I’d be happy to mail you one. Let me know in the comments. If you want to reimburse me for postage, I’ll mail one further afield. They do no good sitting in my basement. And you can always get the free PDF on the website. 

From the Archives: Alone, Together, Silent, Vocal, Collaborative

Image of a piece of paper with "freedom and responsibility" written on it
freedom and responsibility

Ah, 2017, such a quaint time when we still used Adobe Connect. 🙂 It was a pleasure to go back and re-read Jenny Mackness’ post, The power of silent learners | Jenny Connected.

While the post and the webinar it reflects upon focus on learning/education contexts, there is a lot we can extrapolate to today’s mix of online and F2F. It is always good to remind me, a person who thinks by talking (which is not just being an extrovert!), that people experience the world in different ways and we can use that diversity and design for it, or try to put it in a box. NOT!

The post gives a detailed report on the webinar Jenny attended, and why she liked it. What I like about her post is this question:

The main thought I have come away with is to question whether it helps silent learners to focus on them in this way. Jan Willem felt it does, because he feels that there is not enough recognition of what silent learners can offer. For me the danger is that in doing this we may reinforce the view that somehow silent learners are a problem and that we need to solve this problem by enabling them, empowering them, to become a bit noisier. Personally, I don’t think that learners can be empowered by others. They empower themselves, although they can be supported in doing this.

I appreciate Jenny’s observation. The more we try and HELP people, the more we risk actually diminishing them. 

It appears that the day I saved the URL to Jenny’s post, I also saw something from Fast Company that suggests we avoid the binaries of alone/together, introvert/extroverts and use a pattern of small/large group alternation. 

“The way to maximize creative potential is to flow between being alone and being in a group, and back again.”

This resonates with my approach to group facilitation and is, indeed, part of the fundamental patterns of approaches such as Liberating Structures. As noted in a previous post, this allows for nuance and context. 

From the Archives: A call for wiser research on collective wisdom

A group of people sitting on the floor in a circle in conversation

The amazing Tom Atlee wrote a post in 2014 calling for wiser research on collective wisdom. It is a powerful piece of writing and still worth your time to click on the link. What sticks with me is his attention to the need for (and inherent messiness) of including diverse voices in collective wisdom. From the days of George Floyd’s death in 2020 and the voices and conversations that emerged, we need to consider Tom’s ideas more than ever.

Here is a teaser to get you started…

I take issue with another major assumption of the “wisdom of crowds” thesis advanced by James Surowiecki, author of The WIsdom of Crowds – specifically, his bias against conversation, dialogue, and deliberation. Harri Oinas-Kukkonen summarizes that assumption as follows: “Too much communication can make the group as a whole less intelligent.”

This principle exhibits a profound ignorance of the varieties of communication and conversation – an ignorance that prevents researchers in the field from even glimpsing – to say nothing of clarifying – more comprehensive and authentic forms of collective intelligence and wisdom. Most forms of collective intelligence and wisdom are deeply dependent on the interaction of diverse entities, usually in the form of conversation.

When Surowiecki and his followers speak out against communication among the guesstimators in a “wisdom of crowds” exercise, what they are actually speaking out against (without realizing it) are interactions that reduce the level of diversity in the system. What produces the crowd’s accurate collective answers is aggregation of its non-manipulated diversity. This is one way to “use diversity creatively” – a central feature of collective intelligence. But this “wisdom of crowds” aggregation approach is limited to getting collective answers to questions of fact – including predictions (future facts) and currently unknown facts (like the location of a sunken submarine).

 

via A call for wiser research on collective wisdom.