[manga illustration by hyperbolic pants explosion]

I didn’t see a clear winner in tonight’s presidential debate (except C-SPAN, which has created a great resource with their “Debatehub”, useful as the debates happen and afterward). Had things turned out as they did in a foreign policy debate that actually focused on foreign policy, I’d give the tie to Obama based on the various predictions that of the three planned debates, this was the one McCain was most likely to dominate. But neither candidate really rose to the occasion. Both were dispassionate– Obama didn’t turn on the jets as I hoped he would, McCain didn’t fall prey to his temper. It felt like McCain dominated the clock with long-winded answers, but Obama did nothing to assert himself either (of course, neither did Jim Lehrer, invisible moderator man). Still, I thought Obama delivered the only memorable lines of the night, beginning one response to McCain’s discussion of the Iraq war:

“John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007.”

the only moment I thought one of them might break out and show some emotion was when Obama incredulously questioned McCain’s dubious claims to being a “maverick”:

“John, it’s been your president who you said you agreed with 90 percent of the time who presided over this increase in spending. This orgy of spending and enormous deficits you voted for almost all of his budgets. So to stand here and after eight years and say that you’re going to lead on controlling spending and, you know, balancing our tax cuts so that they help middle class families when over the last eight years that hasn’t happened I think just is, you know, kind of hard to swallow.”

But it didn’t happen and the bus turned right back toward snoozeville.

In the end, Obama was more thorough and precise with details that effectively countered McCain’s claims. The transcripts read well for him, putting him in relatively sharp definition compared to the vague stump-speech platitudes from McCain. But McCain sounded more sincere– or at least more personally engaged– and ultimately showed a bit of the calculated simplicity and direct personal address that I believe won Bush a wholly undeserved second term.

As a skeptical Obama supporter feeling more and more disappointed since he won the primary, this was not the kind of performance I hoped for.

[photo by {platinum}]

[I left a longish comment on Jen's "Network Persuasion" post, but putting more there seems rude, so I add a bit more here]

I suppose every discipline is like this, but educational technology (to adopt a very broad rubric, but intending it in the most inclusive sense of the term) seems particularly prone to the problem of not looking outside of its own (necessarily) narrow literature when considering phenomenon that cross many disciplinary boundaries. Beyond the normal problems of inter-disciplinary knowledge– there’s so much out there to be known in the many fields that "education" covers–  I think it speaks to a subtle, but deep-seated sense of technological determinism. Jen considers "the network" in the Connectivist and contemporary educational pedagogy sense and makes the accurate observation that "our own biases and prejudice lead us to build networks of people who share our beliefs and culture." If you remove that statement out of the context of social networks mediated by digital technology and consider it instead in the context of social groups and networks as they would have been considered 20 years ago, it seems dead obvious. Who doesn’t know the saying "birds of a feather flock together?" It’s a proverb so old it was already old when Plato used it in 360 B.C. And it wasn’t only in the simplistic sense of people performing an action together, but in the complex social sense– a few hundred years later Seneca will be advising Lucilius on the danger of operating solely within like groups– not just those who say yes to anything you say, but even the diverse but relatively like-minded.

That this idea feels new isn’t a matter of ignorance, but of a deep assumption that the technology used to facilitate and sustain groups has some kind of  bearing on the nature and quality of that group. We talk and talk and talk about the network (and I mean we, because I do so as much as anyone) and how it works and what it does. But most of that’s really a shorthand or a convenience for referring to (or eliding) the much more complicated question of what is actually new in these networks and what that potentially means. What characteristics distinguish these networks from the ones educators (to choose one example) had before there was an Internet and a world wide web? Because in figuring that out– and only in figuring that out– can we make sense of what is happening now and have a productive effect on what happens next. There’s a wealth of research going back hundreds of years into the dynamics of group formation and decision making in fields as wide-ranging as sociology, statistics, business and advertising, psychology, sociology and political science that wasn’t suddenly invalidated when the method of transmission changes from the telephone and letters to twittering and blogging (and telephones and letters) or when the network nodes grew to include electronic sources of information, analysis and decision-making.

I think there are some important differences that characterize current "networks" including relative diversity (perhaps our networks aren’t as global as we might like or think, but they are generally far more global and diverse than they would or or could have been in 1998 or 1988), speed (of transmission, formation, deformation, reformation), resilience, the strength and proportions of directionality. But I don’t think those differences dictate any particular result or determine the nature of the groups formed in and of them. The characteristics we can decipher are merely the outward manifestations of a great, underlying current of potential that may or may not come to pass. The future is determined not by the technology, but our understanding of and use of it, and part of that understanding has to come from integrating and accounting for the knowledge generated from a diverse set of domains and, ultimately, paying close attention to the human inhabiting the machines…

[photo by Thomas Hawk]

I don’t know who Artichoke is exactly– an educator in New Zealand sums up my biographical knowledge… but anyone who can as easily allude to Dr. Zoidberg as T. S. Eliot or Matthew Arnold while writing thoughtful, incisive and often complex posts on education, educational technology, information technology is sure to get my attention. New Zealand’s particular politics and educational institutions are different than those I labor within, but the themes found in Artichoke are universal: a passion for inquiry, enthusiasm tempered by skepticism, the constant struggle to make some sense, an affection for classical literature, Latin and stationery, paper, pens… OK, so the last few might not be universal, but I particularly enjoy them. I can’t claim to understand everything Artichoke says– every other post of his (?) I read adds a new title to a "to read" list that already far outstrips my most optimistic mortal span– but Artichoke remains constantly rewarding.

[image by Mike Licht]

Sometime while I was sleeping, Simon Owens of Bloggasm was kind enough to drop a note pointing out his recent article on the PBS MediaShift blog regarding Scott Rosenberg’s upcoming book on the history of blogs and blogging (noted in conjunction with last week’s Friday Focus post). Owens’s article makes me even more interested in Rosenberg’s book because, as I expected, it looks like it will be a meaty and thoughtful volume, not a puff-piece nor a regurgitation of the typical blog history mantra, e.g. "In the beginning was Jorn Barger or Dave Winer, then everyone was doing it, and now there’s no way to know what blogs are."

Incidentally, I’d heard various possible titles in different stories, but my favorite is the one Scott R himself confirmed: Say Everything.

[image by yomofo]

As we work on the goals for our impending entry into the OpenCourseWare fracas in order to formulate something approaching a strategy to make it happen, I’ve been giving a fair amount of thought to the purpose and use of open course materials. Adding ourselves to the growing list of OCW consortium members (not to mention the wide array of other, similar initiatives, formal and not) and contributing materials in the same way is valuable, but of limited interest. Given that, why join in such an initiative? What do we hope to achieve?

CDE is, course, motivated in part by many of the same factors other open course sharing institutions are, having distance classes that are relatively unique and/or approaching a state of revision already and/or particularly suited to our institutional needs and interests. That’s a given. As an organization, CDE is committed to the (much abused) idea of innovation and a posture of continual experimentation. We prioritize projects that are interesting and challenging– and often with wholly unanswered questions. Where possible (and when successful), we hand those projects off to other organizations for regular production and operations. In her recent post Visualizing OpenCourseWare, Carol Gering shares some research into characteristics of OpenCourseWare materials from a couple of representative institutions. Through working with Carol, and reading and discussing the topic of open education with various colleagues, I’m starting to refine the areas that are of particular interest to me:

Addressing the Independent Learner (and Educator)
Most of the FAQs and mission statements and declarations of philosophy of various organizations involved in providing open educational materials in some way mention a global audience for their work. But much of the actual materials don’t really address the needs of a few core group that I feel a moral imperative to serve: the independent learner seeking a comprehensive educational experience and the educators and facilitators helping unaffiliated learners gain that kind of learning experience. I believe there is immense value to many populations– the most obvious being under-privileged populations and those residing in developing nations where access to institutions and the resources to pay for that privilege are scarce. An English Composition class that is designed to do more than provide random information access and be something other than a resource for professional educators and their students will look quite different from the same course designed for a student working their way through such a course independently, seeking a significant educational experience, with or without the help of a non-expert educator or facilitator. For the latter, a course needs to have a significant and useful amount of practice, modeling, self-assessment and reinforcement exercises that in other circumstances would (one hopes) be provided by the educator adopting the material.

Integrating Learning Community
Again, realizing that we are talking about addressing something other than what I take to be the relatively traditional users of open content– namely professional educators and learners seeking to address very specific needs akin to receiving training (Skip Via’s comment is well-taken)– my philosophy of powerful and productive education is one that puts a high degree of importance on integrating learning communities into the process. Learning communities include the traditional peer community of learners, but also the variously typed and organized communities of other learners affiliated with the same institutional sponsor, previous learners who used the same materials, hobbyists and prosumers applying what they’ve learned, and professionals actively engaged in work that uses the skills and experience obtained through taking a course.

How can we use the immense power of various kinds of social software available to us and already being actively integrated into the educational environment to benefit those engaged with open educational materials? Are there productive and manageable ways to store and share artifacts and promote discussions amongst (sometimes radically) asynchronous learners? Can we capture any of the responses and thoughts of educators to improve and enrich the materials? Are there methods involving transparency of progress and historical records of progress of preceding learners that could be used to guide and motivate those that come after? Can any of these community mechanisms be used to make progress on one of the most difficult aspects of open education geared towards independent learners: providing support and even evaluation?

Creating Fully Open Content
Though there’s no mandate to do so, it surprises me that so few courses are available that are based wholly upon media, readings and resources available for free to anyone, thus making the course much more useful to those for whom traditional textbooks and purchase of readings and subscriptions is beyond their means. Clearly this is easier to do with some courses  than others: developing a Romantic Literature course would be much easier to do based on completely free resources than a course in the modern novel… but wouldn’t the willingness to create such courses be a powerful partner and motivator for those working on Wikibooks and other open textbook (and similar) initiatives?

Interest-Based Design and Provision
OK, I just made that description up. And I know this isn’t at all an uncommon consideration. But I find myself confused and uncertain about how best to (literally) make open materials available. Is there a productive compromise between meeting the demands of portability and easy integration and addressing the needs of sustained learner interaction? Simple is often best, I know, but even the simple solutions turn out not to be when examined closely. And then there is the question of licensing: Creative Commons? Open Educational? One of the older, geekier alternatives?

Again, I want to reiterate that I know these are not original or unique concerns and issues… they’re just the ones that make a foray into this space particularly interesting and part of the moral foundation that guides me in the first place. Many of you are involved in creating and sharing curriculum and other media and materials… why do you do it? What are your goals? Who do you consider to be your audience?

By no means an obscure selection, this [last] week’s Tuesday [Friday] Focus is Salon co-founder and author Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard. I admire Rosenberg’s consistent, even, reasonable tone even when grappling with issues at that curious– sometimes fantastic– intersection of technology, politics and journalism (can the two be at all disentangled?), and literate and artistic culture. Dreaming in Code is a great read, one of the few books I’ve read that get at the heart of the interesting and important world behind software development and programming… and it does so in a way that techie and non-techie alike can enjoy. Needless to say, I’m really looking forward to Rosenberg’s forthcoming book on blogs and blogging.

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