The Third Bit

My Who Decides? post has produced some rather heated email. In answer, no, I am not defending the existing university system: I quit my faculty position at the University of Toronto in part because it doesn’t serve students well, and doesn’t have a future beyond elite networking-building [1]. But the fact that educational reactionaries are wrong doesn’t mean that all educational revolutionaries are right; it particularly doesn’t mean that the centralizing pseudo-progressives are on the side of the angels.

For example, quite a few people have pointed me at Clay Shirky’s recent post comparing Udacity with Napster. In it, Shirky says:

The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.

OK, I buy that. But in talking about some feedback Udacity got on the awful quality of its statistics course, he says:

Conceding that Delta “points out a number of shortcomings that warrant improvements”, Thrun detailed how they were going to update the class. [emphasis added]

Aye, there’s the rub. In the Udacity/Coursera/Khan model, “they” are the only ones who can update the learning material, and thereby decide what’s to be learned. Where’s the hackability? When, where, and how can I fork their course, make changes, and send a merge request? Sure, I can set up my own, but if I have to compete with Harvard’s prestige (read: its old boys’ network), that’s like saying that anyone could set up their own TV network—in practice, only those with bankrolls like Turner’s and Murdoch’s can pull it off. (I used to write for The Independent in London, and felt very sad when it stopped deserving that name.)

As far as I can see, the pseudo-MOOC model that the New York Times and others are gushing about effectively concentrates power in ever-fewer hands. Some of it is indirect—if 90% of learners get their lessons from six “prestige” schools, a lot of voices will effectively be silenced—and some of it is pretty explicit:

You may not take any Online Course offered by Coursera, or use any Letter of Completion as part of any tuition-based or for-credit certification or program for any college, university, or other academic institution without the express written permission from Coursera.

Got that? You can watch their videos, and do their exercises, but you can’t even take the badge they give you somewhere else unless they say you can. That’s a hell of a lot more restrictive than any policy any old-style university I know of could get away with: there, the receiving institution decides whether or not to accept prior work, and the granting institution has no say in the matter.

A while back (January? February?) somebody in Mozilla’s learning team asked whether we should be teaching kids how to re-mix their Facebook pages. I think we should instead teach them how to re-mix the walled-garden LMSes that everyone seems to want to hand their future to.

[1] I predict that within five years, we will see companies offering residential campus life to 18-25′s who are getting their education online. They’ll provide exam invigilation (so that those digital badges the kids are earning actually mean something), a gym, lab and studio space for sciences and the arts, and most importantly, a chance to socialize. I do not think this is a good future—in practice, it will set the clock back to 1950, when higher education was the preserve of a privileged few.

Learning

One of the last things I did before leaving the University of Toronto was start UCOSP, which gives students in CS a chance to work in cross-country teams on open source capstone projects. I learned recently from Karen Reid and Michelle Craig that it has grown considerably: 20 different Canadian schools are involved in the 2012-13 academic year, and next term, the list will also include Stanford, MIT, University of Texas, Cornell, University of Singapore, University of Tokyo, University of Sichuan, University of Helsinki, Tampere Univ of Tech, Imperial College of London, and Jagiellonian University. Kudos to the organizers: it’s great to see it thriving.

Student Projects

Sal Khan and Michael Noer recently recorded an 11-minute webisode on the history of education from 1680 to 2050. It angered Audrey Watters, and I think my take on why says a lot about where I stand on education, online or otherwise.

Michael Noer works for Forbes, whose byline is, “Information for the World’s Business Leaders”. I don’t know how many business leaders actually subscribe, but I’ll bet that most of them believe that education’s role is to prepare people to take their place in society. As Khan & Noer point out, Bismarck’s Prussians invented modern public schooling as a way to create the skilled workforce they needed. For the powerful, in Thatcher’s England just as much as Stalin’s Russia, that’s been its purpose ever since.

Throughout the 20th Century, though, people like John Dewey and Michael Young have believed that education ought to be about giving people more power over their lives—which necessarily means the currently-powerful will have less. Real reformers like these have therefore almost always found themselves allied with suffragettes, labor organizers, civil rights movements, and other progressives.

Which brings us to the battle shaping up around online education. After explaining how the Prussian model was imported in the United States, and how the present 12-year model was formulated in the 1890s, Noer and Khan say, “…we’ve basically been stuck there for 120 years.” Watters’ response is, what about Brown vs. Board of Education? What about similar changes that were supposed to level the playing field for children with disabilities, or for women, or the GI Bill that opened higher education to millions of people?

But this isn’t Khan & Noer’s point. The 20th Century may have changed who got an education, but had almost no effect on how that education was delivered. There were attempts (particularly in the 1960s), but most K-12 and university classes today use the same lockstep model that they did in the 1890s. That’s what ed-tech advocates want to change.

But how far are they willing to go? Watters continues:

…to jump from 1892 to 2000…ignores the vocal opposition to that so-called factory model and the construction of alternatives by educators themselves. It ignores the entire progressive education movement. It ignores the work of John Dewey and Maria Montessori. Conveniently… [It] ignores the work done by numerous educators and technologists to think about how computers and networks will reshape how we teach and learn. It overlooks the work of Seymour Papert and all his students. It ignores the decades of research on cognitive tutoring and the notion that a computer should be able to respond on an individualized level to each student—something that Khan’s history of education credits to Khan himself.

Yes it does, and that’s what this fight is really about. I’m sure the Silicon Valley and Wall Street types behind most ed-tech startups welcome the fact that women, people of color, the disabled, and plain ol’ folks can get an education these days—they’re not racists or misogynists or anything like that. However, they clearly aren’t interested in giving up control over who decides what gets taught. Flipping over to Twitter, Watters said:

2012-11-03 13:32: Almost 3K words in this NYT piece on MOOCs, but couldn’t spare a single one to mention Siemens, Downes, Couros, Cormier…

Did you recognize any of those names? They’re the people who actually invented massive open online courses (MOOCs), but you won’t find them mentioned six times in as many weeks in the New York Times. The reason, I think, is that they take the “open” part of “MOOC” seriously: they actually want to let the people who are learning decide what to learn. That makes their experiments a lot less interesting to “the World’s Business Leaders” than the Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, and other pseudo-MOOCs that let you watch professors chosen by someone else repeat a fixed lesson as many times as you want, and do the exercises set by the powers that be whenever you want, to earn badges that someone else has made up.

“Gosh, Greg—that sounds a bit campus-radical paranoid.” Yeah, it does, but go and read Larry Cuban’s recent post on power, ideology, and the (mis)use of evidence in national politics and school reform. There is very little evidence that technology of any kind can transform education, but the people who currently have power keep talking as if the matter was settled. Think about that, and about how the current drive to move education online will concentrate power in even fewer hands, and then ask yourself, as Audrey did, “All this revisionist history of education technology. Gee, I wonder why these are the stories being told?”

I don’t wonder at all.

Learning

Twice this week I’ve heard the claim that ignorance is strength—that not knowing what’s been done before in an area is actually an advantage, because then you’re not hamstrung by preconceptions. When challenged, the people making the claim offer hypotheticals: “Would Louis Armstrong have invented jazz if he’d studied classical music?” (He actually did know a lot of the kind of classical music the Boston Pops plays today, and didn’t really invent jazz.) As I’ve said elsewhere, I think the real reason people want to believe in “unschooled genius” is that it gives them an excuse to not shovel a mountain of prior art looking for a handful of diamonds. What I’m looking for now, though, is something I remember reading several years and several computers ago: a medium-sized essay that shredded the “ignorance is strength” argument both logically and evidentially. If you were smarter than me, and not only bookmarked it, but copied that bookmark forward onto whatever machine you’re using now, I’d be grateful if you’d share it.

Later: I appreciate the anecdotes people have added as comments, but anecdotes (in any direction) aren’t proof. What I really need is the detailed, evidence-backed argument…

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