It struck me that there isn’t really an open lab for learning innovation – and that P2PU could be it. During Monday night’s board meeting we discussed sustainability, and Neeru riffed on the platform idea a bit. She wondered if we could model ourselves as a research institute. There would be heaps of experimentation and research, some of it driven by us and some driven by partners who want to work with us, and each year we would publish a string of short reports about what we are learning. Cathy added that we could connect it to an annual conference with great speakers from the P2PU community who share the results of their work, and suggested that corporations would be willing to pay substantive amounts of money for this knowledge.

Which brings me to the term “lab”. Speaking to more people about the idea of a “platform” made me realize that it’s a term that means different things to different people. And when I explained that it was a mechanism to support experimentation and research, they would ask if it was “kind of like a lab.” And that’s exactly what it would it be like.

The idea of an open lab for social learning sounds exciting and it feels in line with our original spirit of experimentation. What would it look like?

Supported by a platform that is extendable, hackable, malleable and customizable – We need a sandbox, so that we have a place to experiment, and track the results of these experiments. But the sandbox is not the important piece here, it’s a means to an end (or a journey rather).

Run by a community that is passionate about peer learning and openness, and thrives on experimentation – In her comment earlier, Karen pointed out that talking about “platform” wasn’t enough and asked “how do content, community, and methods tie into this?” She is absolutely right. What happens on the platform is directly connected to the values and principles we hold as a community. I think we need to spend more time talking about what they mean to us – but our three original values of open, community, and peer-learning have stood the test of time quite well so far.

Turning experiments into great learning experiences for lots of people - This third bullet is new and still a bit wonky (and needs word-smithing). But it’s an important stake to put in the ground if we want to make sure our work has a broader benefit. Many research labs have to rely on industry to turn their work into products and services that affect “normal” people. As a result success is often measured through proxies for innovation (like scientific articles, or patents, etc.) because the research work is at least one layer removed from the “end-user”. Luckily that’s not the case for us, because the end-user is part of the P2PU community. Why not be bold and try to measure impact through our ability to turn experimentation into great social learning experiences that work for many people?

While Harvard can focus on innovating teaching and learning within the institution – we could be the open learning lab for everyone. Thoughts?

Thanks to Brandon Muramatsu and Vijay Kumar I’ve spent some time this week trying to make sense of the latest developments in this space. Vijay and Brandon invited me to speak to the students in their “Open Education Practice and Potential” course at the Harvard Extension School about “Opportunities in Certification of Open Education” (slides are embedded below, and there is a recording of the elluminate session as well).

My core set of slides that I use in most presentations starts with the suggestion that “the system is broken“, which I think is true but also gets peoples’ attention. I then argue that because of open educational resources the content problem is fixed, and that increasing access let’s us connect to millions of other people to learn with. Which means “now everyone can fix the broken system.” Enter P2PU. While P2PU is a good example how this is true for the learning piece of education, is it really true for the certification/credentialing? Can the open education community hack certification?

To answer this question, I decided to walk myself and the group through the steps of creating a certificate that has value and legitimacy, and use examples that exist today to highlight my points. What do you need to make a certificate?

Step 1 – You need a source of authority

In the past, this authority came from the reputation of institutions (“Nevertheless, he’s an Oxford man.”) and an intricate system of accreditation bodies and quality review structures. It’s a system that works well for disciplines that don’t move too fast, and as long as it can reasonably be true that only a small group of “experts” really knows what’s going on. Unfortunately, and there are many reasons for this, even this old system often breaks down (“Oxford, New Mexico!”) and increasingly relies on seemingly random college rankings to establish authority.

While it has its’ challenges, the existing system offers great opportunities for open education projects to move from the informal to the formal learning world – and give its users access to mainstream credentials. That’s why the University of the People is bravely working towards full accreditation, which will let them issue degrees that are equally recognized as other colleges in the U.S. P2PU has decided to not pursue accreditation – it felt like we’d have to give up the most interesting things about our model in order to qualify – but instead to partner with accredited institutions like the University of California Irvine for certification (that is backed by accreditation, just not ours).

But you don’t need an institution anymore to issue certificates. David Wiley (as usual, one step ahead of the curve) already did this a few years ago in his “Introduction to Open Education” course where anyone who completed the materials could request a Wiley Certificate. But David Wiley is a Professor at an accredited University, so he is still part of the accredited system, right? Right! But you don’t even have to be a Professor, or have a college degree for that matter, to do the same. John D. Britton, Software Evangelist at Twilio and maverick geek, credentialed participants in his P2PU course by leaving recommendations on their LinkedIn profiles. And they listed the P2PU course in their education history.

Maybe the most exciting example of new sources of authority is Stack Overflow’s Career 2.0 portal. The details are worth their own blog post – but essentially Stack Overflow has found a way to surface community rankings and evaluations in a way that can replace degrees. It’s much more granular and shows the specific skills and interests a developer has, it’s transparent because it links directly to the evidence for the results, and it’s based on the opinions of thousands of fellow software developers. Stack Overflow is betting that employers get more value out of reviewing applicants on Careers 2.0 that they would get from a college degree. And I think they are right.

Step 2 – Something to show your boss, and that you can hang on your wall … your Facebook wall

It’s great to have a wall full of degrees, but very few people get to see them. Wouldn’t it be more useful if we could instead share these degrees on our Facebook wall, our wordpress.com blog, our tumblr stream, and or our LinkedIn profile? And while we are busy hanging degrees, why not also share all the other achievements we might be proud of – the fact that we took a “Vegetarian Cooking” course at the Culinary Institute, that our fellow open source developers named us a “Community Builder”, or that we solved Mozilla’s “JavaScript Expert” challenge. We are entering future territory here, but this is exactly the kind of system P2PU is working on with Mozilla (and support of the MacArthur Foundation and friends) and piloting in the School of Webcraft. An open badges infrastructure that let’s anyone issue “badges” (that’s what we call these signs of recognition) and that let’s users move them freely around the web. For details check the background materials on the Mozilla wiki and follow Erin’s blog.

I agree with most of his points (powerpoint lectures stink, presentation/podcastast/videos should be made available for students out-of-class, there is a lot of bad teaching, etc.), but have not experienced the same resistance by students to leave behind the “broadcast” model of lecturing. My impression is that the cause for student resistance is unrelated to technology or teaching styles. Too often, students don’t know why they are studying a particular topic, and how it relates to their degree and their lifes. In such a situation, where students don’t see the relevance and meaning of what they are supposed to learn, they rely on lecturers to break down the content in a way that — at least — let’s them succeed on the test. However, once the purpose is clear, students readily embrace opportunities to engage more actively. The resistance I have experienced comes mainly from lecturers, who are comfortable with a teaching style that is designed not to challenge their “expert” positions vis-a-vis the students. Admitting that there is something they don’t know is scary for many lecturers, but it’s the norm online – where every google search and visit to wikipedia is an acknowledgment that there is something we don’t know.

An important point that Jeff makes about half-way down the article (a little too late in my opinion) deals with Jose Bowen’s fundamental support for technology:

Mr. Bowen is part of a group of college leaders who haven’t given up on that dream of shaking up college instruction. Even though he is taking computers out of classrooms, he’s not anti-technology. He just thinks they should be used differently—upending the traditional lecture model in the process.

We know that when technology is used to alleviate bad teaching practices, it will often just compound the problems. The easy, and wrong, response is to blame the technology. Rather than point out examples where bad teaching was made worse, we should look at how the best use of technology is innovating learning. The problem is that these examples might be easy to overlook, because they take place outside of institutions, or because learning becomes a part of solving a problem or taking action, rather than exist as an activity per se. A friend recently pointed out the practices of knowledge sharing in the online poker communities, which seem perfectly in line with the ideals of academia. And it comes as no surprise that many smaller institutions, often colleges and technical universities or Art schools in the case of Professor Bowen, are able to move faster and innovate more rapidly than their larger more traditional (and sometimes more reputable) counterparts. Yet, unless we start looking at what’s happening outside of education institutions, we might miss a technology-enabled revolution in learning that takes place right in front of our eyes.

Apparently something similar is happening in cycling:

Licensed under a CC-BY 2.0 licensed by revolution_cycle

For some of these speed freaks, the videos are clearly repetition of materials that they have already learned, and they are just skimming through them in preparation for an exam. But many of the users in Taiwan did not even show up for the exam (the courses were not mandatory). Also, in Taiwan it turned out that all of the users who liked to go faster, lived in the same dorm – nobody who lived outside of the dorm had come up with the idea.

I would be interested to find out how self-learners that have no interest in assessment work with these videos – do they also find them too slow? And how do students feel about their professors (too slow)? Thanks to Telkom‘s bandwidth policies, I rarely download lecture videos, but I do listen to quite a lot of podcasts. And different from these OCW users, I usually find myself pausing and skipping back to listen to certain passages a second time, rather than wanting to go faster.

On the upside, this could also mean that using tools which develop collaborative practices and encourage the open sharing of ideas (such as wikis) will remap our brains in ways that will lead to more socially beneficial behaviour. So that the experience of sharing ideas might allow us to get better at sharing land, water, and oil? Let’s face it, those are important skills to learn!

Following is the complete letter to The Atlantic, that was sent in response to this article “Is Google making us stupid?” by Nicholas Carr (I underlined parts of it).

Nicholas Carr correctly notes that technology is changing our lives and our brains. The average young person spends more than eight hours each day using technology (computers, PDAs, TV, videos), and much less time engaging in direct social contact. Our UCLA brain-scanning studies are showing that such repeated exposure to technology alters brain circuitry, and young developing brains (which usually have the greatest exposure) are the most vulnerable. Instead of the traditional generation gap, we are witnessing the beginning of a brain gap that separates digital natives, born into 24/7 technology, and digital immigrants, who came to computers and other digital technology as adults.

This perpetual exposure to technology is leading to the next major milestone in brain evolution. More than 300,000 years ago, our Neanderthal ancestors discovered handheld tools, which led to the co-evolution of language, goal-directed behavior, social networking, and accelerated development of the frontal lobe, which controls these functions. Today, video-game brain, Internet addiction, and other technology side effects appear to be suppressing frontal-lobe executive skills and our ability to communicate face-to-face. Instead, our brains are developing circuitry for online social networking and are adapting to a new multitasking technology culture.

Gary Small, M.D.
Director, UCLA Memory & Aging Research Center
Los Angeles, California

She argued that part of the reason we are lacking more generally
accepted ways to describe effectiveness of open educational resources
is that the OER movement was founded on a belief — sharing knowledge is a good thing — and not much more.
There was no clearly defined goal, not even a clearly defined problem
that this movement was created to address. What the community is
lacking is a shared goal, why we are developing all this stuff. If we
had a shared goal and then some smaller goals to support the overall
one, we would have a better idea what we are doing this for.

She went on to suggest one (actually two) such goals: Increasing the
amount of knowledge in the world, and more equitably distributing it.
As a result there would be more that we know about the world and how to
make it a good place, and more people know it and have access to the
power that comes from knowing it. I am paraphrasing her – she was more
eloquent than my typing was able to keep up with.

While I like the way she describes the goals, I do not agree that they
have been absent. Maybe they haven’t been as clearly expressed as the
goals of the free software movement were laid out by Richard Stallman
early on — but many of the projects that are part of the OER movement
do in fact increase the amount of knowledge in the world and more equitably distribute it.
The OER movement has many facettes, and different people and
organisations participate for very different reasons. There are first
efforts to identify a shared narrative — for example through the Cape
Town Open Education Declaration — and these will provide a map of the
landscape that projects can relate to, but we have seen that the belief
in a powerful idea — that sharing knowledge is a good thing — can
provide enough common ground (or is it shared ground) for many
incredible things to happen. 10 years ago, who would have thought that
there would be over 6000 courses published openly online, that there
would be an online encyclopedia that reaches beyond the size and
quality of traditional encyclopedias, and that we would be using
software developed by open communities of volunteer contributors to
make it all happen? All of these things increase the amount of
knowledge in the world and help to more equitably distribute it. Maybe
it took a empiricist like Candice to take a hard look at the movement,
and verbalise what the community had been doing all along, without
being fully aware of it.

Jon makes a sound argument that top teachers need better compensation and incentives, but in South Africa it is not just the top teachers, but all teachers. Only focusing on the top 1%, and by proxy the top few% of graduates that are taught by these teachers, is not enough. My sense is that many developing countries have a small group (maybe 1%?) of highly-educated and skilled people, but what is needed is a broader middle-class of professionals; and the teachers to educate them.

It’s exciting to see different voices bringing different perspective to the argument for breaking down boundaries, and increasing innovation!

The workshop wiki is online and we would love to get feedback and comments for improvement. Some participants already asked us to run the event in their universities and we are planning to build a workshop blueprint/model that others can use as well.

The current version is a preview that we want to share with a broader community to get initial feedback and comments. Along with the declaration text we have compiled an extensive list of FAQs, which go into much more detail and allow more flexibility than the declaration.

Please, have a look at both, and if you disagree or you feel we are missing an important aspect, send your feedback here. If you really like it, please tell us as well (and keep you pen ready to sign up when it launches in January).

It seems like a useful model to think about rip-mix-learn practices, which are all further towards the “active” side of the triangle than the traditional lecture style of teaching and learning.

However, I am wondering to what extend the model has been tested and how much empirical evidence exists for the statements implicit in the triangle. It makes specific statements about a “2
week” timeframe, and assigns percentages (we remember x % of something) to different types of learning (reading, hearing about something, speaking about it, etc.). I wonder how reliable those percentages are, and how they were arrived at.