Purely Reactive

Part I was my first post on this blog to “escape” comment and my only one to explicitly invite comment, so I’m on my own here. It may well be that the expectation is that I should finish what I started, not leave things hanging. Very well.

My basic point in that previous post was that, contrary to one explanation for why online learning has plateaued, I don’t think the re-ignition of the growth in online and blended learning awaits some new technological innovation we don’t have. And I say that despite seeing, just yesterday, a reaffirmation of that position in the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s “Wired Campus” blog: “Online Programs: Profits Are There, Technological Innovation Is Not.” Stepping around the swamp of speculation about online learning as a cash cow (think how many ships of foundered on those shoals), I’d say what we’re really waiting on is a fuller  understanding what of we have in online teaching and learning now, at least potentially.

That understanding, I would aver, is not unlike the understanding western civilization had to move to in its last great technological revolution (using the term as it should be used, to signify real upheaval and overturning). When, in the mid-1400s, the advent of the printing press meant that, not just the putative Word of God, but the words of Aristotle (and a host of other past luminaries) could be put in the hands of the literate laity, professors were as frightened as clergy that they were being superannuated, “automated” out their jobs as mediators of truth, learning, information.

That turned out not to be the case, of course, though it took centuries of growing literacy (we’re still working on that) to get the full sense of what the change was (and was not). Books didn’t replace teachers. They enabled teachers, empowered teachers, required teachers.

Ditto technology. It has made faculty more important than ever before. Their job was never (just) information transmittal. Books would have sufficed for that. But what we’re after is not information, but knowledge. Knowledge is the fruit of interrogation, interpretation, application, criticism, synthesis. You need teachers for that. They have plenty of work to do. And technology helps. Arguably, it helps most of all by getting us past the idea that the transmission of information is the great goal.

Nobody puts this better than John Seely Brown, particularly in a keynote talk he did at the University of Colorado’s 2005 Teaching with Technology Conference. He is all over the place in the talk, making fascinating observations about how amateur astronomers are outdoing their professional counterparts, partly because they engage in more online collaboration. I might have missed the key insight at the end if I hadn’t been listening to this as a podcast (and during a long run). He suggests that we are moving from one model of education, particularly college education, to another.

The old model is a one-way exchange: people who have information give it to those who don’t have it. This is basically a packaging operation: wrapping up thought (in lectures, courses, books) and presenting it. As JSB reminds us, this is not the only model of education. He notes that the model of graduate education was always supposed to be different — not one wherein people with information give it to those who don’t, but one wherein everyone has access to information while one among them (the teacher, of course) is especially good at navigating through it, understanding the gaps and tensions, pointing out the really productive points of inquiry. Now, says JSB, there’s no good excuse not to use this model with undergraduates and not just in graduate seminars. The general and remarkable access to information — a 24/7 proposition — should free instructors to focus on the really fun parts of teaching: the invitations to critical thinking, the fruitful interventions, the point-of-need support, the re-directions of attention, the due recognition of accomplishment.

In short, it’s not the technology that needs to change, but the teaching. And the change has already begun. What technology has done is enabled the change by being a transformative medium: not old wine in new bottles (because that’s boring) but something different because done differently. Students are likely to resist the change as much as some faculty — thinking is hard work — but the problems and solutions are pedagogical, not technological.

That, at least, is one way of looking at it.

Telling tales out of school again: I was at a discussion of online learning at 80th St (CUNY Central) last Friday. We had been asked to read a much publicized, government-sponsored meta-analysis of studies of online and blended learning. In the press (the NY Times for instance), this had been billed as a study that (finally) showed online learning produced even better outcomes classroom-based learning, with blended learning proving better still. I could go into the skepticism the study has inspired, even among advocates of online instruction (see John Sener’s comment on the “good news,” for example), but I’m more interested in where we go from here. I think the premise of the meeting was that now, as never before, we ought to get going with online and blended learning. These alternatives are now established — and the institutional benefits are presumably transparent with enrollments spiking, new faculty hires hitting new records, and students ever more interested/acclimated.

Typically, I was interested in something else entirely. I’ve been doing faculty development for online/blended learning for a decade (and even a fair amount of “administrative development,” if you know what I mean), and so part of me was already feeling “been there/done that.” But I had also prepared for the meeting by looking into what else I might find that was useful. I had read, in addition to the study, recent surveys of online instruction’s growth like the latest annual Sloan-C survey. One point of interest was that, now that an article of faith was established fact (as studies go, anyway), there was still such resistance to online learning, registering as strong doubts about quality, especially from faculty. (A pretty compelling example of the genuine fear online learning inspires in faculty appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Ed a couple weeks ago as “The Dystopia of Distance Learning.“) And slowing growth belied the turned corner. It had been decelerating even as evidence of successful outcomes had been gaining steam.  Now, according to some, it was even stalling. That was in fact what one maven had said in a Reuters release the day before the meeting and picked up by publications like USA Today:

Richard Garrett of Boston consultant Eduventures Inc. said interest in online education may have plateaued for now, awaiting innovations that will transform the experience beyond screen imitations of the brick-and-mortar curriculum.

There seemed to be no intended irony to this appearing immediately under the heading “BELLS AND WHISTLES?” I suppose that was one of the things that made me take notice. For me, the ironies always pointed in the other direction. Who thought classroom teaching so wonderful that it should be the gold standard? Was comparability (or better) the great desideratum? Or should we look to reinvent instruction? When the printing press made teaching something other than transmission through an intermediary, it redefined the roles of clergy and academics. Are we due for another such redefinition?

If we are, I don’t think this can or will happen by awaiting some technological innovation we don’t yet have. And I certainly don’t think it will happen by doing all we can to make online courses the simulacra of classroom-based courses (what we used to call, in the old days, “course conversions”). What will make it happen? I’d like to leave that as a question right now. Even if all I’ve said thus far is mere preamble, and I guess it is, it’s also a lot to wade through. So I’ll give myself some breathing space (and others a chance to weigh in), and try to push this further in the next post.

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.

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.