Purely Reactive

The ubiquity of information, combined with what’s happened in the economy (an economy that, like Monty Python’s flying sheep, did not so much fly as plummet), has spurred another round of discussions around what teachers (and colleges and universities) are good for. Drew Gilpin Faust’s  “Crossroads” piece in the New York Times — “The University’s Crisis of Purpose” – is an example, one that tries (strains?) to rise above utilitarian demands to articulate a higher calling for institutions of higher learning. Yes, goes the gist, a college education is important for getting a better job or income and also for keeping up with Joneses — especially the Joneses (whatever their names actually are) in Europe and Asia — but a college education is so much more than that. So it’s said. But not very well. We are so lame about saying what that “more” is. Less lame or at least time-honored attempts — notably Newman’s Idea of a University — would sagely note the effort has been going on forever (in Newman’s case, as justification for borrowing from “pagans and unbelievers” and even Protestants).

Something similar happened when open education and/or online education got a lot of supposedly smart people struggling to say what the role of the instructor is or should be. And we’re in another such cycle. One listserv I’m on has noted that the upswing in enrollments and the downturn in the economy have made online instruction the “cutest kitten on the block” right now. With everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Barak Obama touting online education, reporters are once again asking what the prospects are for some kind of turned corner. While important steps like Cape Town Open Education Declaration seem not to be on their radar, ventures like the University of the People are, and so some are asking why we need to bother with bothersome things like accreditation. Inevitably, when they hear of PLEs and the like, they ask if we even need to bother with the instructors.

I always have some dread of as well as interest in the discussions that ensue. There’s lots of talk about the importance of making sure students pass muster — the instructor-level equivalent of the utilitarian issues Drew Gilpin Faust was trying to get beyond at the institutional level. But we weary quickly of talking about instructors as enforcers — too uncool — and that’s when things get really bad. Out come the ineluctable phrases “sage on the stage” and “guide on the side” –  directly connected to my gag reflex at this point — and there’s something already shopworn about the variants like ” sage on the side” and “guide on the stage.” Again, we’re struggling with things we’re not very good at articulating — often, I guess, because we’re being too generic and general.

What we too often don’t get into is how invested we are in what lies behind the notional terms “course” and “instructor” and “student”: so much cultural baggage and historical weight and institutionalized investment that we don’t have to worry about any of them going away soon. We can talk all we want about “communities of practice” and their importance to learning while forgetting that they usually don’t need to be set up. They are so vital that they are almost always already there wherever  learning is going on. There are exceptions, I suppose, but I also suppose that to be a really effective autodidact you have to have an intelligence on the order of someone like George Eliot.

So what happens when you stumble into situations where you have real (social) learning going on without a “course” or “instructor” or “student” — where, moreover, there are  no established alternative structures (e.g., apprenticeships) or even communities (peer/practitioner networks) because the practices are so new?

That’s a situation I think we now face in open education and online learning resources to some extent, with the great shining example (my favorite, anyway) being the CUNY Academic Commons. Still in beta, but due for general release very soon, it has to open itself up to what you might call “community formation”: groups will have to define themselves on the Commons, both practically and conceptually. Some are pre-existing communities of one kind or another, while some are groups just trying to get started. A representative of one of the latter wrote me over the weekend and asked, essentially, who would set that group up. I wrote back to say, essentially, that the Commons was a platform, not a service, but I and others would be willing to help with specific questions.

However inadequate that response might have seemed to the person I was replying to, it represented a leap of faith for me. It’s not as if I only imagine those “others”: there are people I could name right now. The problem is they are already people who have done the lion’s share of the work on the Commons, people approaching burnout. The activity they generate/bear represents an example of Clay Shirky’s power law distributions — as he puts it, “Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.” Those who accept more responsibility for the Commons, for instance, are going to do so much more than the larger number who want to tend their corner, or to lurk. And that’s fine.

But maybe we could broaden that A-list of people who welcome others, offer help, or share how they set up a group with a group in formation. I wouldn’t want this to be a call for more “leadership” –  such a loaded term. And this would be more subterranean anyway, as befits an online resource. Here it’s not a matter of commanding the spotlight or the megaphone but of reaching out in quiet touches, individual contacts with new arrivals, correspondence across groups and areas of interest. It would have to be motivated by willingness. I guess what I’m hoping for a vast conspiracy of the willing.

Alternative title: Block That Metaphor

I’ve been working on a presentation that is supposed to give some sense of our own dear CUNY Academic Commons to the outside world, and I have to have the requisite visuals. I thought it might be worthwhile to give folks a sense of what I came up with, though this was with more than a little help from Matt Gold et alia.

First, I wanted to show what the Commons is not. Well, not altogether, anyway. There were completing conceptions that did not quite capture all that we wanted the Commons to be.

Competing Conception #1: A Repository of Stuff. For that, I came up with

An image inspired by Borges' "Library of Babel"

and, because Borges’ piece is very much about endlessly receding taxonomies (”To locate book A, consult first book B which indicates A’s position; to locate book B, consult first a book C, and so on to infinity …”), also this:

A taxonomic concept map on how to do taxonomies

Few things could suggest, better than these paired images, that the twin challenges of categorization and location for such a “repository of stuff” are dizzying. But if that conception is not the “right stuff,” neither is the whole-hearted focus on social interaction.

Competing Conceptions #2: The Gathering Place, the Agora, the Hub

It’s not enough to bring people together. Even and especially if you do manage to do that, you may only have a crowd.

Sunbathers at Manhattan Beach

Too much lollygagging? Maybe. Alternatively, I pictured it as part marketplace, part traffic jam.

Hyderabad Traffic and Market

The Commons is not (or not just) a place to come, hang out, interact. This is a more contemporary conception than a static repository, but it does have the enormous challenge of getting people to come and also structuring that activity without getting in the way of it. The watchword for such sites is often “If you build it, they won’t come” — and then what are you going to do?

Well, you could go organic. What these conceptions don’t take in is notions of growth, development, evolution — each a different way of framing the summum bonum of what we wanted the Commons to be and have.

Better Metaphor #1: Roots and Branches. Matt sent me this picture of a well-rooted tree as a possible image for the Commons:

Roots, roots everywhere

Lots of roots, but just one trunk — which reminded me that a stand of trees is often a clonal colony, that tree roots can beget new trunks in rhizome-like fashion. The great example is Pando [from the Latin for "I spread"] – aka the ”Trembling Giant” of Utah (a clonal colony of aspen trees with an interconnected root system that may be the world’s largest organism). I found a picture of those aspens on Wikipedia:

Quaking Aspens

These Quaking Aspens may quake and tremble, but we probably want a better suggestion of activity than that.

Better Metaphor #2: The Beehive.

Matt also sent me Jim Groom’s post “WPMu as Beehive,” which featured this image.

Honeycomb

That, strictly speaking, is not a beehive but a honeycomb — though what better visual way to drive home the point that you could have an organic image/metaphor that foregrounded storage? What I wanted was just such an image, but with some activity in it — some busy bees:

The idea of the beehive is especially useful because it helps to stress that, if you feel forced to choose between the repository and the hub of activity, you’re submitting to a false disjunction. As the beehive reminds us, you can have your storage and your activity too, your honey and your buzz. Social networks are about stuff as well as interaction. Facebook has become the largest collection of photos in the world, for instance. What might a Facebook for academics become?

One good thing about not posting for a while: you’re subjected to so many things to react to that you start to wonder if, taken together, they might add up to something. There were lots of little things that made me think they do, but the big things were The 6th Annual Blended Learning Workshop in Chicago and WordCampEd in CUNY just a couple weeks ago. (For the latter, I’m linking to a recent blog post which is also an omnium gatherum of other posts and commentary on the event.) The former I’ve been in on (as a conference planner) since the beginning (almost since the turn of the century), but it was my first WordCampEd. And I might not have seen what they have in common if we didn’t have the Call for Proposals coming out for our own CUNY IT Conference (the 8th Annual). The test is to come up with a theme that is a big enough umbrella but still says something about where we are and/or where we are headed. For why this year’s theme felt like a no-brainer, I have to go back to CUNY’s problems with Blackboard.

As should be common knowledge by now (and this has certainly been dealt with elsewhere), many if not most of CUNY’s problems with Blackboard were not actually problems with Blackboard (but washed-out bridges to it). That, as far as I’m concerned, is part of the point. The really interesting thing is less the problem(s) than the inadequacy of any single-shot solution. In the wake of the Blackboard outages, a lot of the talk was focused on leaving Blackboard 8 for some other version of Blackboard (versions 6-9) or some other commercial course management system (Angel, Desire2Learn, etc.) or some open source CMS (Sakai, Moodle, etc.). And the problem with these ways of addressing the problem(s) wasn’t really that getting CUNY to switch would be as easy as getting an elephant to do backflips in a closet. It wasn’t even that, at least with commercial platforms, Blackboard (aka Blackborg) could go on assimilating the competition, as when it ate Angel recently. It was that switching CMSs meant trading Tweedledum for Tweedledee. There would be no real gain in functionality. (If you don’t believe me, go comparison shopping at EduTools.)

But that is moot. What the two conferences taught me was that it isn’t about platforms anymore. Well, it is — has to be — but the game has changed. It’s about managing myriad tools and choices now — the flavors of social media you can use with students, the various disciplinary dispensations and constraints, the divergences even and especially within disciplines according to pedagogical style, the powerful centrifugal forces introduced by the students (what they know, want to use, have been exposed to). Decisions about these happen at so many levels — institution, department, instructor, student — that there can be no one ring to rule them all.

If I’m looking for a CMS now, it’s no longer a course management system; it’s a complexity management system. There are a million plates spinning on poles that we have to keep jiggling. There’s the need to balance innovation with resource management, flexibility with planning, choice with some sense of a shared landscape, especially one where effective practices don’t just emerge but can be recognized. (We can only get so far with random acts of innovation.)

Like everything else I think about here lately, this takes me back to the (necessity of the) CUNY Academic Commons. If there is any way we are going to handle all that we must — keeping up, connecting up, sorting out what works (if only for some, or in certain contexts, or whatever other conditons you want to attach) — we have to do that collaboratively. There is no other way. To keep a million plates spinning, you need a lot of pole jigglers.

You know how your familiar haunts look different when you’re showing them to out-of-town guests? How Penn Station or Grand Central or a subway junction like the one at Columbus Circle or Union Square suddenly seems much more complicated when you see it through an out-of-towner’s eyes? That’s sort of the way I felt when I was showing the CUNY Academic Commons to those assembled at the Office of Academic Affairs meeting last Friday. (This was an OAA Senior Staff meeting — people reporting directly to Executive Vice Chancellor Logue.)

This is not to say that people weren’t receptive. On the contrary, they were very complimentary. I heard heartening comments like “This is just what this university needs.” And Matt Gold and I had gone over the best things to show beforehand. I even had a few soundbites like “This is sort of like a Facebook for academics.”

You probably winced a bit at that (I know I do), but what I was trying to get at, and followed up explicitly with, was some sense of the value we are placing, not just on social interaction, but on serendipity. We want that sense of happy discovery: I didn’t know there was a group on THIS, or I didn’t know So-and-so was interested in THAT, or I didn’t know another campus was also doing work on THE OTHER THING. I’m a fan of StumbleUpon, and I want the stumble-upon effect of hitting on just the thing even though it was a thing you didn’t know you were looking for: in our case, the chance meeting with someone whose interest you share, the epiphany that that you’ve chanced upon a section of the wiki you can and should contribute to, that sort of thing. That’s hard to convey in a guided tour — not that I didn’t try

But seeing this with others’ eyes, imagining what it would be like to enter for the first time, also made me aware that an emphasis on social networking and serendipity, on what you might stumble upon, might just lead to stumbling, even fear of falling. (I guess I was especially aware, in a roomful of university deans, of what a prospective user might think who doesn’t have a lot of time, who doesn’t want too much [or even any] social implication.) What do we do for the new users who come with specific needs or the out-of-towners whose biggest concern is not getting lost?

I should say that I think the answer doesn’t lie in design — at least not entirely. A system can only be so navigable; a home page, only so informative. But it occurs to me that the reference to train or subway stations might be more apt than I had thought at first. How about something like an information booth? In addition to help documentation, site maps, and the like (and it would be great to have that), how about a prominent feature of the Commons that asks the new user or out-of-towner if they’re looking for something, if they need help. (I’m not thinking of the “contact us” feature with an anonymous e-mail address.) What if, for instance, we had something people could post that would immediately be sent to members who are  online and/or relayed by RSS feed to those who aren’t? If we could make the digital equivalent of sitting in a Welcome Booth or Information Desk fully collaborative,  the lift for the individual member wouldn’t be that great, and the responses could be almost synchronous even if they were asynchronous.

Someone could even get back to me right away with the suggestion that there’s a place for suggestions for the Commons, and it’s really not the proper province of blogs….

In a case of asynchronous synchronicity, I was hit all week by digital surfacings of the same topic, one I was sensitized to by a couple of relevant books I’m looking at, one titled The Paradox of Choice (about how we are hobbled rather than empowered by the putative option of having the “best” of whatever) and one titled simply Glut (which wryly looks at the “information age” historically, finding we always seem to have felt overwhelmed, desperate for the ultimate key or codex). These probably had me primed for a host of online mentions of what one piece in Inside Higher Ed called “Knowledge Overload.”

Ordinarily my reaction to locutions like that is to bemoan the semantic slippage besetting us these days. Information overload is really about data, not information (information should make you feel informed, right?), and knowledge in phrases like “knowledge management” is really just about information. Something has to happen to information — some activity, typically within some community of practice — to turn it into knowledge.

But, as it turns out, Ken Coates, in his piece on “Knowledge Overload,” was not misusing the term. He was talking about so much activity on the part of scholars that it has no reasonable outlet, just unreasonable ones, like being on one of 50 sessions run concurrently at a single, fairly well-focused conference (one of the examples given in that piece). In another piece, almost a companion piece, from Inside Higher Ed later the same week, Scott McLemee reported on the announcement from the University of Michigan Press that it is shifting to digital publishing. Keeping up with change (and sheer volume) is a challenge that justifies (almost demands) that university presses consider such a move, and McLemee has little patience for those who “will read about Michigan’s initiative and decide it means turning monograph publication into YouTube with footnotes, more or less.” But his is not an unequivocal acceptance of the inevitable:

When the University of Michigan Press blog promises the creation of “a rich, functional and efficient publishing environment,” it seems appropriate to feel a pang of dread — not just for the future of a great academic press, but for scholarship itself. Substitute “publishing environment” with “dining experience” and you have the language of the fast food industry.

And even that may miss the point. McLemee talks about the experience of disseminated knowledge, whatever its form, the activity of reading, an individual experience. Coates hints (but only hints) at something more: “There may well be a convergence possible between Academe 1.0 and Academe 2.0. New technologies certainly do find things faster and share them more broadly.” And later Coates asks whether “we, in the world of Web 2.0, really need to constantly add to the number of published – and sadly unread – academic journals and books. Can we not elevate the scholarship of synthesis and interpretation back to the highest rank of professional inquiry, recognizing the remarkable talent needed to bring together in a readily digestible form the accumulated insights of thousands of scholars?”

More almosting. If this is just pure distillation and synthesis, that sounds about as attractive as a scholarly Reader’s Digest or Publishers Weekly. But if we think of this as an activity that brings to light something that otherwise would not be visible — like “Making Invisible Learning Visible,” the current HASTAC forum led by Randy Bass and Bret Eynon — then we have something that is more useful, something possible only through collaboration, a way of making knowledge in the process of sharing it. I think this is much more than distillation, though we have a lot to do and a long way to go. This is partly a way of updating and repurposing what we already know, partly a way of keeping up with what we don’t know but need to, partly a way of sifting what we most need to know locally and globally, short term and long term. I think of this sifting process as the Long Haul, kind of the way Chris Anderson describes the Long Tail: a way of playing out the possibilities so that everyone can find out what they most need, what’s the best fit, what’s the thing that really makes a difference. I heartily hope this is one of the things the Commons allows us to do for the knowledge we need to realize the possibilities of academic technology. Heaven knows we do need it.

I finally took my own advice, and read the latest installment in Randy Bass and Bret Eynon’s blog for the Chron, an installment titled “A Plan to Develop and Spread Better College Teaching Practices.” I’ve long been an admirer of their work, individually and collectively — I met Randy in the early nineties, around work with networked writing programs (does anyone remember those?), and I’ve already referenced Bret’s admirable “Making Connections” project which not only collects and extends previous work on eportfolios but promises to take on much more. One plan they shared to develop and spread better college teaching practices was of course the Visible Knowledge Project, which perhaps more than any other single endeavor, convinced me that going digital was a game-changer for teachers, that it could transform not only the teaching activity but the collaboration and development around such activity in consequential ways, and the overarching reason was there in the title: it made what people were doing more visible, share-able.

Excited by the authors and their title, I was also energized by our own plan “to develop and spread better college teaching practices” with the CUNY Academic Commons. Coming with such high expectations, I confess I found the installment oddly formal and abstract, and that surely is at least as much my fault as theirs. It was unfair to expect a full plan, of course, much less one that spoke directly to our plan. What they did was invoke work that pointed in the direction of a plan, much of it by “almosting” it (to use Stephen Dedalus’s convenient coinage). So they mentioned “repositories such as Merlot,” for instance, but also “focused communities of faculty …. such as the Lesson Study Project at the University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse, or the Faculty Inquiry Network linking California Community Colleges” and “rich exhibits at Inside Teaching, from the Carnegie Foundation, and the Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive.” They might also have mentioned Project Bamboo, that nascent endeavor Steve Brier described to us at the January CAT meeting, which combines the reach of Merlot with the social networking of some of these newer and more focused projects (but is by no means “there” yet).

The burning question is why these are all only “almosting” what we need as a plan and a structure — why, for instance, you can almost see the virtual tumbleweeds blowing through Merlot. (And the question behind the question is obviously what we can do to make the CUNY Academic Commons do and be more.) Part of the answer, I think, has to do with a word that recurs throughout Bass and Eynon’s blogging: “community.” That’s a problematic word when academics use it precisely because (as  Joseph Harris, drawing on Raymond Williams, pointed out some years ago) it always seems to be used positively. And there’s plenty that is problematic about “community”  — dissensus within, enclosure from without, too-blanket a conception, and often the presumption rather than the fact of community in the first place. These enduring problems with community are complicated by our present situation, the fragmentation of our time and our pursuits, the way “networking” seems to place demands on us more than bestow benefits, etc. We need the Commons to help us forge communities and a larger, overarching sense of community without giving us all the problems that can come with “community.”

I think it (and we) should stand a decent chance for some reasons that are probably worth mentioning (though I’ve already made this so long it exceeds my own attention span). One is the way being part of CUNY situates us: we are connected whether we like it or not by certain circumstances — geographical, institutional, economic. (One thing that defines “real” community is shared problems.) But we are also loosely connected, too loosely in some cases and to some minds. (Nothing is more common in CUNY cross-campus talk than fear of “re-inventing the wheel” — in working long and hard on what another campus has already worked out.) So we have pre-existing bonds, but we also have real needs to bond further. That bodes well for the Commons if we can make it work for us.

And we don’t start from scratch. Bass and Eynon have called for “an R&D division for teaching in higher education,” yet we have that. (It’s just too unorganized to call a division.) When I read that, I was brought back to a meeting the Sloan Foundation set up a few years back between some of us in online education and a bunch of people who do corporate e-training. In introducing the academics, Frank Mayadas (the Sloan program director who set up the meeting) said that we were the ones who had been doing the R&D around new forms of teaching. And we have. What we haven’t done is pull that together. What we haven’t ensured is that those of us who are working on new forms and new modes don’t find/feel that is an isolated and isolating experience. (The first comment on the most recent Bass/Eynon blog installment came from J. Elizabeth Clark of LaGuardia, who said, “We really don’t yet have many digital teaching communities, except for those of us working on similar projects. We really need to move in this direction so that our working lives mirror our teaching lives and our everyday lives.”) If we could use the Commons to bring our work and our needs together, we could do the Commons — but also ourselves — a lot of good.