No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences

Gardner Campbell, Baylor University
Jim Groom, University of Mary Washington

For the session this afternoon

I have the distinct pleasure

To introduce two of my good friends

Gardner Campbell, from Baylor University

and Jim Groom from the University of Mary Washington.

They require absolutely no introduction beyond that.

That's why we'll let them get on with the show, so

please help me welcome these two guys

Thank you, Cole

Thanks everybody for being here after lunch

This is always the great deadly zone

where your blood sugar and my blood sugar

the biochemistry, the neurons

but we're going to force through this

we're going to make it

I have a good feeling about this

every presentation I've been in

has something very striking in it for me

sometimes it has been ideas

sometimes it's the level of innovation

just the sheer energy of innovation

sometimes it's a little more close to the bone

the session that Leigh Blackall did

I don't know if he's in here now

but the session he did before lunch

really struck me with the sense of frustration

that I feel...a lot...maybe you do...

that we live in an age of marvels and wonders

that don't seem to be making

a substantial difference

in the most serious activities

we engage in as human beings:

Education

There are a lot of reasons why that's no-one's fault

There are a lot of reasons why that's everyone's fault

and there's a lot of people

we can point at and blame

sometimes justifiably so

but rather than round up the usual suspects

I have this sense of

What a waste!

Why is this not happening?

We've had the Internet

We've had computers

We've had all these amazing conversations

at conferences like this

about the possibilities

Is this making a difference?

I mean we can say:

Sure, we have success stories

but we keep thinking

when does the tide turn?

when do we get to the place

where we can say

Yeah, we're on the upswing

Clay Shirky in 2008 wrote:

" We are living in the middle of

the largest increase in expressive capability

in the history of the human race."

I think that's true

except that probably we're at the beginning

and not the middle.

But this increase in expressive capability

and the history of the human race

ought to be the abiding

transforming concern of all education.

Higher Education is the place

where we train people to be able

to take advantage of this to the fullest

and surprise us with things we have not discovered

about what this can mean

but whatever it means

we may disagree about what it means

Look at that!

I believe that that is true

It makes me do what I do

and yet it is as if

day after day

I sa: " I have a bag of gold.

Would you like a bag of gold?"

and people say:

"Where do you find time for bags of gold?"

"Oh, no ..another currency to master."

"Gold, is that sustainable?"

Like: "No, you spend it..."

Well..."What would you spend it on?"

"What would you like to spend it on?"

"I don't have time for your philosophical questions, Gardner".

It's a bag of gold

What part of that do you not understand?

I love this

This is the Cortex A9,

a chip that is in production,

and I'm afraid that the audio here

is not going to be sufficiently loud

so I'll just tell you what Adrian Cockcroft says

but if you really wanna to get the full spooky ride

go to the IT conversations podcast.

Have any of you heard him talk about Millicomputing?

He defines millicomputing as a computer

that consumes less than one watt

and it'll fit in your pocket

and it will not burn your leg

This chip is in production

It will appear in devices probably the next year or so.

It has four graphical processing units

each of which independently can process

a full H.264 high definition stream

and coding, decoding

He talks about the way we're not going to carry

computers in our pockets.

We're going to carry web servers

in our pockets

we're going to walk in to a context

and wirelessly link-up

with the things we want to do in that context.

There's usually where I stop

when I play this for faculty

because the next part is even spookier

in which he talks about the way these milling computers

will allow us to be in constant contact

with a society of avatars and a virtual world

who will be able to,

because of our wearable computing,

to tap us on the shoulder

and have a conversation with us

while we are here in real space as well.

Now to me that can be a real bag of gold

or maybe we don't have time to

amplify our beings that way

I'm not going to say this is going to be easy

or that's not going to have problems

or be fraught or spun a whole new wave of

milling cyber computing crime.

But if it's going to happen

and there are great possibilities it will

why doesn't it make a difference?

why hasn't that made people

stop and say

I guess I could recapture a sense of wonder

under these circumstances

What do we believe?

"Today's technologies and their consequent environments

succeed each other so rapidly

that one environment makes us aware of the next.

Technologies begin to perform the function of art

in making us aware of the psychic

and social consequences of technology...

We are entering the new age of education

that is programmed for discovery

rather than instruction."

We could, especially if we were an English faculty,

wordsmith this

tinker with it

if this were a faculty senate, it would not get out of committee.

Probably we all believe some variety of that

some version of that

or to put it another way from the Renaissance,

which is my favourite place to hang out

in the virtual space in my head

it's like the Music of the Spheres

in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice

the young Lorenzo woos his sweetheart

with talk of the stars

Is that scalable?

Well, never mind.

"There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;

Such harmony is in immortal souls,

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

Melvyn Bragg , In Our Time,

in the episode of Music of the Spheres

"This is the music of the spheres

the idea that the stars and planets

as they travel through space

make beautiful music together

The Music of the Spheres

played out of the classical world

to the Medieval period

and into the Renaissance

it affords us a glimpse into minds

for whom the Universe

was full of meaning

of strange correspondences

and grand harmonies

I would like to graduate

a generation of students

who will help ME here

to strange correspondences and grand harmonies

that I have not yet imagined

that's what I'm in it for

But oh well,

how you are going to protect privacy?

This is a time of wonders

Usually the printing press is introduced as an example

of a disruptive technology

on the order of what we're seeing now.

No small disruption

The printing press started wars

overturned religious orthodoxy

The printing press meant that any fool

with a piece of machinery

could say anything

and how would you know?

Well, I think that the disruption is on a bigger scale

I think that the disruption we're witnessing today

is the disruption on the scale

of the development of the written alphabet

of the phonetic alphabet

This was a huge deal

This was a technology invented to communicate

with the Dead

so it's not like a tool

it's a meta tool

it's an alphabet

What will I say with that?

What do you want to say?

I don't know...

just tell me what you want me to write

It's a great book

Marianne Wolf, Proust and the Squid.

She talks about the science of the reading brain.

the fact that learning to read

is something we do deliberately

to re-arrange our minds

We make new connections

among the various perceptual centers in our brains

that are not programmed in there

we seem to have a speech center

as part of our revolved neuro anathomy

but not a reading center

we have to do things that do not happen naturally

but once we do those things

we find...

a bag of gold

Clay Shirky wrote a blog post

that really rocked me back on my heels

back in March, on Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

did anyone of you see that blog post?

Yeah..he talks about the ways in which newspapers

essentially played Nearer my God to thee in the Titanic

and they thought they could nibble at the edges

because nibbling at the edges

well, you know you don't have to take a big bite

you don't have to worry of indigestion

you don't have to worry about anything

you just take a little nibble

well, newspapers were nibbling at the edges

in the 1990's

they stopped being a viable business model

this is Shirky's argument

his argument is not that journalism will go away

but that the coincidence of journalism and newspapers

was historically conditioned

and can go away historically

but the newspaper folks

like the professors, maybe like the edtech folks

maybe like any of us in the room

tend to believe that we're in the domain

because we're in the best of all possible domains

this is the way it has to be

not so much

and Shirky coined the term

which really scared me to death

"the digital facelift"

for what newspapers try to do

we'll just do what we did before

but we'll put it on the web

but it'll be what we had before

we'll have some hyperlinks

but it'll be what we did before, etc...

"The Digital Facelift"

Can that stand up against

these items of belief?

"As the means of input increase,

so does the need for insight or pattern recognition

your mileage may vary

I think that's true

The school drop-out situation

will get very much worse

because of the frustration

of the student need for participation

in the learning process

which is not a new need

but it's a need

that had to take some pretty distorted forms

during the industrial age

as we tried to figure out scaling

and sustainability

we did the best we could

but if we find that maybe

that's not the way to go forward

change has to happen

but it's not happening yet

instead we're getting the digital facelift

Now, I have to tell you first of all

this is from Brazil,

a film by Terry Gillian,

which I saw for the first time

when it came out

and I saw again it

it's probably ten or so years since I've seen it

but under the intoxicating effect

of the Reverend

I knew I would have to make a pilgrimage to see Brazil again.

and I found that it told the story

of my life today, maybe yours

Here's the thing that I didn't remember

about this scene

She is loving this experience

To us it looks grotesque

to her...well..she's getting off

She has multiple opportunities

to continue to examine

her increasingly grotesque self

in the pursuit of an illusion

and she's deriving intense pleasure from it

because see how it's framed

this is great!

What I'm doing to you is

I stretch your features out of recognition is great

in this digital facelift you look marvelous

You can't see it because of the light

but he's got these clips

he's holding her face back with

this is where she really gets excited

and finally to make sure it stays the way it should

he puts surround wrap around it.

I assure you there are no further problems

that digital facelift.

Problem solved

or perhaps the digital facelift

is like this poor lady in Brazil

who has immense faith in her doctor

who is a maverick

He's an innovator

He doesn't go along with the flow

He has a special chemical process.

Now it's taking a little while

as she is very delicately skinned

so her results are not coming out exactly

the way she had imagined

Notice the lovely seepage

around the bandages

the eye V

the fact that she is now in a wheel chair

and blind apparently

some kind of support for her chin

she's not in very good shape

but she's hanging in

she's a believer

maybe she's got the wrong guru

because eventually this is what happens

with her digital facelift

they have a memorial service for her

it's a relatively gruesome affair

because that's what's happened

in the end

it's just coming apart

it's a nightmare

I'm not saying that the LMS will necessarily

get us to this

I'm just saying

So what do we do instead of having digital facelifts?

I propose three recursive practices

These practices feed on each other

They're what we do in education anyway

but they can amplified

by information and communication technologies.

One is narrating

having the students

having the teachers

that's the real trouble

thinking aloud

willing to tell the story

of the process of the learning

of the investigation

you could call it blogging

Curating

how do you take care of your stuff

not to protect it

not to even make sure you can transcode it

those things are important

but how do you arrange it

for the people who will come to see it?

for yourself as you contemplate it

Now as scholars

we're pretty used to the idea of curation

and this has to do with dissertations

and scholarly articles and so forth

Many students in my opinion come to college

believing they have nothing to curate

and they will generate nothing to curate

during their time in school.

They'll have transactional exchanges

with professors who mark their work

and those pieces of paper get put in a box

I'd like students to think

that they began their life's work

when they come to school

and finally sharing

Now that I have done it

Now that I've arranged it

Now that I've thought about it

I'm going to put it out there

because it may be valuable to someone

because I may find the unmet friend

because as it was said

so memorably by John Todd in his presentation

"Meaning happens when the two people connect"

Very important

Much of the way education is set up

militates against each of these

let alone all of them together

and yet we all know

that one of the great things

about the technologies that we use

these information and communication technologies

is that they not only allow these things

they amplify them, they augment them

they turn them up to eleven

they make that feedback happen

and when I try to explain this to my students

I inevitably go to Jimmy Hendrix

playing the Star Spangled Banner

at Woodstock

and they say: "Why are you showing us this?"

and I say:

Because he knows how to control feedback

He knows how to play feedback

and that's what you need to know

The effects that get unleashed

in this recursive practice

I think are most powerful

on the open web

using Web 2.0 affordances

or whatever the web is going to be

as it goes forward

because the Web is not just a platform

for these things

it is the natural outgrowth of our desire

for these things

That makes the web itself recursive

And students have an intimation of that

you know,

they have a feeling about that

from their own use of social media

but they think that's somehow

I don't know

that couldn't be right

and they get to college and they find

that no, that really isn't right

we have a template for you, young man

but I think their intimations are correct

so what's the answer

I don't have it

however, here's a framework

for thinking about what...

this is what I use when I try to dream

as big as I can

I try to think about

helping students understand cyberinfrastructure

and how to build one for themselves

to be able to be architects of their own digital lives

which will mean as we go forward

that they need to be worrying about

the things we worry about

but productively together

narrating, curating, sharing

This is a definition of cyberinfrastructure

from the American Council of Learned Societies

in their report on cyberinfrastructure

called "Our Cultural Commonwealth"

Cyberinfrastructure is something more specific

than the network itself,

but it is something more general than a tool

or a resource developed for a particular project,

a range of projects, or, even more broadly,

for a particular discipline."

That's the sweet spot

It's not just the network

it's more specific than that

yet it's not so specific

that it's simply the tool you use

for a particular project or a domain

Something like an alphabet

Anybody here play Little Big Planet?

Little Big Planet people raise your hands.

OK, good

Little Big Planet people grab into the little sponge

Little Big Planet is a game done

by a company called Mollecule

for the Sony Playstation 3

So it's commercial

it's proprietary, etc...

That said, Little Big Planet is not the only game

to build authoring tools into the game

but it's one of the most conspicuously successful

at doing this

so when you buy Little Big Planet

you buy the game

and within the game

the tools to make more levels for that game

in other words

you're able to be within that environment

and be both a participant

and a producer if you choose to be

when you make the new levels

you can upload them

to the media Mollecule server

Oh yes,

they're getting great business advantage from this

but look at the way they're framing it.

You upload it to the server

then people can find you by author's name

they can find you by ranking

you can tag them

ingenious, fun, creepy, boring, brilliant, wow

right?

you can favourite the ones you like best

in about a year and a half

one million levels

have been uploaded

to the Little Big Planet server

at Media Mollecule

one million

let's say that the Theodore Sturgeon's Law is true

90%of them are piffle

there are still 100.000

and because my son is very patient with me

as a learner

though I am slow

the bonds of love mean that

he's going to be there for me

he has taken me through

some of these user-generated levels

and you know

they're really diverse

and they're really cool

and they're really interesting

they're examples of an outpouring of creativity

in what James Gee calls "the producerly mode"

in a subdomain of a larger domain

you could call it undergraduate research

you could call it service learning

you could call it situated cognition

you can call it any number of things

it's cool

it's fun

it's work

it involves the whole person

there's gotta be a way

that we can make it happen in education

more consistently than it does

or at least to think about it in these terms

so kids don't lose hope

Here's a Little Big Planet

It's the graphical user interface

called cPannel

for the hosting service

at Bluehost

which is where I've got my stuff

and my stuff is there

I have backups of my stuff

you know, I trust no-one

be a little skeptical

and yet I'm committed

Here are the things I can do with

the graphical user interface

at the level of systems administrator

or someone who plays one

through a GUI

Here are the things that I need to think about

Now look at this

this allows me to be producerly at the level of the server

for my own digital life.

There's a getting started wizard

okay that's fine

I need to know about changing passwords

I know sometimes my students think about

changing languages

that would be really cool, etcetera

email, managing your own email

you can have a thousand, two thousand email boxes in here

your file system

they've got to know about that

these are not terribly difficult things

but they are important

and taken as a system

they become more important

I like my students to have a digital presence

where they can track who comes to see them

it's an important part of the narrating, curating and sharing

and it can all be automated of course

and you've got a choice among several

security - we'd want our students to think about that, right?

but I'd want them to think about it as digital citizens

architects of their own cyberspace

not as people who have to find the website

that tells them what safe computing is all about

at our school

That should go without saying

because they're thinking about this already

They're going to have multiple domains

or they should.

Data?

Data Literacy is vital

Can they have a nodding acquaintance with databases?

Sure

and then the software down here

this is kind of interesting

software and services

one click: which blogging platform would you like?

try out several

groupware, livechat, utilities, content management,

client management

do we have to do all of those?

No

Do they have to read all the books in the library?

No

Do they have to take all the courses in the catalogue?

No

Why do we have more there?

To amplify the possibilities

To give them some room to roam

Some room for discovery

A place to play

I mean, those of you who've heard

either Jim or me or Martha Burgess talk about

The Bluehost Experiment

in Washington

where we essentially let the staff loose in this environment

This is the next step for that

in my Little Big Planet

put the students in this kind of sandbox

let them play, let them innovate, let them discover

what if you give it to 4000 students

and there are only 100 works of staggering genius emerging

oh well, that would be ok

more scripts, e-commerce

marketing, photo galleries

webmails, website builders

a couple of wikis

and you can get in there and install your own

they don't have a one click install for me wiki

which is a regrettable omission but

you can get in there

that's pretty outlandish

when we were South by Southwest

somebody very some high I'd say

at the end of the presentation said:

Are you saying that our students

need to be system administrators?

and I thought about it

and my first impulse was:

Oh No, not at all..that would be extreme

and than I thought twice and said

Yes, actually that is what I want them to be

system administrators

if it is easy enough to do

which the graphical front makes it

and if system is understood

not just as a particular installation

but as a metaphor for their digital lives

they'll have to be system administrators

for their digital lives

what are they going to do when they graduate?

what are they going to do when

they're raising children?

None of this is going to roll back as we move forward

Every book will be digitized

Every journal will be digitized

That's a good thing potentially

but only if people are able to think about this

in this personal way

"When radar was new it was found necessary

to eliminate the balloon system for city protection

that had preceded the radar.

The balloons got in the way of the electric feedback

of the new radar information.

Do you get that?

The advanced defensive capability

was stymied by the old defensive capability

Such may well prove to be the case with much

of our existing school curriculum...

I think that's true

Let's talk about openess a little bit

What does it mean to be open?

When we talk about openess we usually think

to be open to the world

Everyboy can see it

That's where you're going to be exposed to

the most massive network effects

So I like this, obviously

I think a lot of us here do

although there have been

some really good interrogations of the idea

but there are other levels of openness as well

or to put it another way

places that are closed where we can't see

the things are closed

What about being open to each other in a learning community?

What about the teacher to the learner?

and the learners open to each other?

To what extent does the Blackboard discussion forum

make the participants actually open to each other

To what extent are learners

ready to talk about their vulnerabilities to the teacher

and oh, maybe they're not willing to do that

because the teacher is not willing

to talk about his or her vulnerabilities to the learner

Vulnerabilities are fine

That's actually where the learning happens

To know as we are known requires identity markers

this is a non-trivial factor

Any adult that says this is a trivial factor

has forgotten what is was like to decorate a locker

or is denying the fact that they actually agonized

over the choice of the Welcome mat for their front door

These are non-trivial factors

and finally open to ourselves

To what extent do the learning experiences

we co-create or impose

open us up to self-awareness or meta-cognition

The thing about the personal cyberinfrastructure

is that once the students have begun to build it

it can then be the object of

narration, curation and sharing itself

at a meta level

let's get together and talk about

the cyberinfrastructure you built

why did you build it that way?

what does that represent about you as a learner?

or as an architect?

what the one I built?

what if we modularize

and start swapping it among ourselves?

like levels of a game.

where we can rank the efficacy of the various modules

we built on our own and together

then you learn something about yourself

that would be ok

This is a discussion forum in Blackboard

it looks like email

Why does it look like email?

That's a rethorical question.

It's perfectly transactional

It moves data from one point to another

The trouble is that's not a learning community

Where's the decorated locker?

Where's the doodle on the notebook?

Where's the marker of identity?

Well, it's here.

phpbb

one click install

from cPannel

Oh, you can have an avatar

Oh, you can choose a username

Oh you can have a SIG file

a non-trivial marker of identity

it looks nicer

oh yeah, this post was Wednesday January 16th 2008

January 18th 2008 while the class was going on

that forum kept active for about 6 months

after the class was over

Why?

I set it up but I did not choose the templates

for their expressions of themselves

and their identity in that space

there was enough openness

that they could decorate their lockers

some of the forum belonged to them

Well, that was kind of interesting

This thread belonged to them too, BTW

but that's another story

What do we believe?

"The aspiration of our times for

wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness

is a natural adjunct of electric technology...

The mark of our time is its revulsion

against imposed patterns.

We are suddenly eager to have things

and people declare their beings totally.

There is a deep faith to be found

in this new attitude

- a faith that concerns

the ultimate harmony of all being."

Strikes you as Utopian?

Strikes you as over-stated?

Is it the Music of the Spheres?

I think some kind of faith

Something like this underlies education

Unless we think we are just training Pavlov's dogs

We want people

who will find those strange correspondences

and make them audible

to each other and to us

Can a personal cyberinfrastructure do it?

I don't know

I've never got any chance to try that out

I know what happened

when the staff did it at Mary Washington

It was not uniform

and the story that doesn't usually get told

is that it took 2 1/2 years

of kicking, screaming, biting (that's a metaphor)

There was actually some screaming

of people saying:

How many minutes a day

do you want me to blog, Gardner?"

I got that, absolutely

I had to bite my tongue because

I was about to say

You know, I get that questions from my students a lot

but that would've been bad

that would've been very, very bad

but it's the same idea, it's like

Can I turn this into a transaction yet?

Can I make this job into just a job of work?

and you know, beneath all of that

there are all sorts of anxieties

they may be principle resistances

there could be a lot of things

so there was a long way to get there

but when we got there

well, we got there

and there are five more

sent back

who got there too

Perfect? No

Decisively different? Yeah

So is this our default?

Is this critical thinking?

I don't know

We live in a risky, dangerous environment

full of people who are trying to manipulate us

and pick our pockets

That's undeniably true

It is true that people acting in what they will say

will be your best interest.

so hoping that at some point

Stockholm syndrome kicks in

you identify with your capturers and go willingly

enjoying the digital facelift or whatever it is

but this for me can't be the default

and part of why it's so exciting

for me to be at this conference

is that there is another way to think about this

there's another way to think about confidence

Maybe narrating, curating and sharing

breeds confidence

"Western man acquired from the technology of literacy

the power to act without reacting...

Not a bad thing

as the write points out

it's important that the surgeon

not be overwhelmed when performing the surgery

In the electric age

when our central nervous system

is technologically extended to involve us

in the whole of mankind

and to incorporate the whole mankind in us,

(and make that human kind)

we necessarily participate, in depth,

in the consequences of our every action

That's what we all fear,

its what we all long for, I think.

that's somehow even the small things

can be meaningful

Anybody who watches a Twitter stream

in, during and on election,

wants to feel this way

It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof

and dissociated role of the literate Westerner

Overstated? Sure

Extreme? Maybe.

Aloof and dissociated role of the literate professor

Westerner?

Such is the faith in which this book was written

It explores the contours of our own extended beings

and our tecnologies

seeking the principle of intelligibility in each of them.

For me the idea of the personal cyberinfrastructure

is about the search of the principle of intelligibility

in our technologies

What the personal infrastructure would be

is a representation.

A creative representation

of that intelligibility

maybe of that search as well

In the full confidence that it is possible

to win an understanding of these forms

that will bring them into orderly service

I've looked at them anew

accepting very little of the conventional wisdom

concerning them."

I'm glad that a Canadian did that.

Aside from Clay Shirky,

the quotations I read

were from Marshall Mc Luhan

in Understanding Media, 1964.

I don't know what you knew about Marshall Mc Luhan

when you were going through school

what I knew about him was

how he had a cameo in any hall.

I was cheated in my education

Along with some genuinely bizarre things

there were genuinelly prophetic things

in this book

and I think they aligned very well

with some of the sense of urgency

and some of the scope of ambition

that we all feel,

that we all share

at a conference like this

The personal cyberinfrastructure

may not be the only way to learn this alphabet

but I'd like to try sometime.

Jim?

Rather than bore you with any of my details

let's not lose some of this thread to this

does anyone have any questions for Gardner?

Yes, please

So I was wondering

some of the examples of software that you

that's easily installed that you provided

are forums and things like that

if everybody has their own

some of these become more useful in agreggate, right?

so, have you thought about sort of

certain things being sort of you know,

individual elements of a presence in cyber insfrastructure

others aggregating or working across federation

Excellent question

In my dream world the student...

Bryan Alexander is a champion

I do not want your bread right now

but when you are well again, I'd like it

So the idea would be

the student's Baker Club gets together

and they talk about how they're going to organize

and of course something is going to be online

because it needs to be

because of these affordances

One student says:

I could put a phpbb forum

Another student says

Yeah, and actually did you know

there was this add on?

and then as a group they agree

1) it would be better to have one forum

rather than multiple forums

2) they aggregate their knowledge about

what would be the best instance of that

3) they put it together

and by doing that

the lights will go out,

the tables will rise

we will join hands and sing

In doing that

what they will be doing is discussing

a particular scripting affordance on a server

but they will be doing it strategically,

in terms of communication needs

and organizational excellence

Doing something other than on a surface level

That's the one of the way I imagine it , yeah

to a certain degree, yeah

in my experience IT departments

will not have thought in a sophisticated way

about how a blog or a discussion forum differ

rhetorically

or how they may be able to shape

student communication

and that's okay in a way

as long as they don't prescribe the tools

or limit the tools

I have an IT department at bluehost.com

and they're very good at keeping, you know,

things up to date and the backups

they're usually very good at that

and so forth

that's their work

but what they have done is to provide me affordances

that I can explore

so, yeah, I mean I think there is

ideally there would be some interest

in the rhetorical questions in the IT shop

and by building a cyber infrastructure

the students would begin to understand

something of what goes on mechanically as well

there would be a greater opportunity for conversation

you know, I think it would be ok

if the students made something that broke

They would learn from that, I think

I also think that

building on what Gardner said

as a response to your question

that the actual cyber infrastructure

as posed by an individual, a domain and a space

allows IT departments

to re-imagine this question

of aggregating, syndicating information

as it is happening

around space

so it does not mean like

the IT department disappears, or somehow the enemy

but it allows them to re-imagine this notion of flow

and this kind of property of electricity

that McLuhan is talking about so beautifully

and if we are talking about electricity and flow

we're talking about a new property

by which we can start to imagine space

through the students having their own

and so IT departments

should be as much excited about

the possibilities for this

rather than ....ing an age old against them

it's not, I mean

it's a kind of matter of us working together

to re-imagine the space

and I think that's why the immediate call back to that

doesn't capture, I think

what that model sets up

as a notion and a mode of aggregation

to kind of build into the syndication

You have your own cyber infrastructure

and then you re-imagine it

and then IT department think about

what that means

right, and

okay..how much time do we have?

okay

Great talk. I'm reminded of Larry Cuban's book

Teachers and Machines

which sort of talks about resistance

that the educational system has

to introductions of technology

and changing actual educational practice

wondering if you might comment on

your thoughts about how

the open educational resources movement

might make a difference

in overcoming that structural resistance

and well, this kind of loops into the IT question as well

it's very easy to paint faculty as stodgy

faculty as vilains

and sometimes it's true

and you know it's easy to say that IT is

the enemy because they can't think outside the box

sometimes it's true, you know

but there are plenty of people in both domains

who, if they are able to see compelling examples

of fresh thinking

will say wow..that's cool

I'd like to do that

I think that would have addressed

what I was thinking about with my students

just last semester

that would have gotten me past this point

where I wasn't able to get them

to read carefully

before they come to class

but that

and this is one of the great sorrows for me

as a faculty member

with regard to Learning Management Systems

aside from all the other sorrows

I can't see what my colleagues are doing

and I mean seeing it on the Web

so I can look at it carefully

and speak to them intelligently about it

Why did you design it that way?

What did you learn from it?

And I think the same thing is true for IT folks

when they go to..I've been to some IT conferences

and , you know, a lot of times

what they are hearing about

are anecdotes of spectacular catastrophes

or whatever

but you're not able to actually...

and there may be some good reasons for this

to some extent

but they're not able to see

dazzling examples of innovation

in a very easy and accessible way

so I think that open educational resources

is a lot more than about exposing content

it's about exposing these compelling examples

of other ways to do it

it's like being able to see multiple

performances of Shakespeare

Oh..never thought of reading the line that way

so the play transforms

I don't know if that answers your question

but, yeah...ok

So Gardner, is it too late for them to become curators

once they get into Higher Education

So, you know, cPannel for me

I could do that..I'm an IT guy

I think I think critically about affordances

but at the same time

is it too late?

I mean..my daughter's eight

she has a blog, domain of her own

shouldn't be starting there?

we get them for four years here, right?

maybe seven

how do we drop down?

somebody said it's too late...too late

I mean I don't know what that idea

of what too late means

I mean we're always in midias res with this stuff

we're always coming into it and imagining it

and Gardner, to refine Gardner,

in that whole of the IT is like

so many people that I have talked about it

and inspired back are right here at UBC

Andrew who is coming from an IT perspective

was just blowing my mind again and again

and Scott Mc Millan, I mean

These are people who are in that space

who are seeing these examples

and you're kind of rip and remixing it

from this space to kind of think about

wow, we can actually play with these modes

and re-imagine them

and I think, wouldn't students also experience that?

at any given point in that kind of narrative?

excuse me, how much further we would be pushed, right

in the academy, if our students were coming to us

thinking critically about it?

Yeah, that's right

so there are a couple of things I want to say

in response to that

One is that there is

a developmental aspect in education,

which is fine with me

What it means is that

at every point along the learning continuum

it will be advantageous for

a mentor, a guide, an expert, a teacher

to be there to coach the student

to their zone of proximal development

that's fine

another way to say that is

that I do not believe that students will make

automatically on their own

to their own innate drive for self-improvement

all the best, you know, choices

I think there is a role for teaching

Now, there's also the developmental capacity

of the human mind, you know

kids at a certain age are able to distinguish

like varying levels of volume

and different sizes of containers

and at an earlier age, they're not able to

so something actually happens in the brain

that makes that next thing kick in

ahm, so there's always going to be

it seems to me

some way in which

the particular developmental moment

will impose certain kinds of constraints

That said and if anybody knows about

Jerome Bruner's idea of the spiral curriculum

that's where it comes from

there's an authentic version of any concept

that can be taught to any child

who can read and write

you pitch it to the appropriate level of development

and you keep coming back to it

spiralling upward and upward and upward

until that magic hand off moment

which I think often happens and should happen

in the upper grades of high school

if it doesn't happen till college

it's still not too late

it's part of the great jolt I got when I got to college

I felt like they had handed the spiral to me

it's like okay - we've brought you around

we've brought you around, we've brought you around

it's your spiral now, you know,

keep finding the level of the concept

that gets you to the next spot

Be your own coach to your own zone

of proximal development

and this is something I left out

and I should put before you before we're done

This won't work until it's built into the curriculum

I don't want you to think that what I'm proposing

is that kids just get assigned these web spaces

and that's it and that they will magically

through tinkering come up with good stuff

This would be an amazing meeting ground

for digital experts in the discipline

librarians, advisors, student life people, edtech folks

instructional designers

Can you imagine?

My feeling is students would come in

and their whole first year experience

would be digital fluency

by means of building out

this personal cyber infrastructure

the first iteration of it

then at the end of your first year

let's have a ceremony

let's have a party

pick the domain that's going to be your domain

for the next three years

and make a decision there

it's all coming of age

it's an occasion

you have to have these rites of passage

but for that whole first year

they're thinking about narrating, curating and sharing

for the rest of their lives as learners

and I think it could be pretty neat

you know, a pretty interesting thing to do

I want to be on that team

that works with students

to say, hey..you're about to do work

that you ought to be able to care about

for the rest of your life

if you haven't done it already

and, I, to get back to your original question

one of the most gifted students that I've run across

in my career is a fellow

I just taught at Baylor last spring

he's got his own YouTube channel

you know, Stop Motion Lego Animation

its most popular stuff gets 40 - 50.000 views

that's been going on since he was 13 or 14

so yeah, what if that was baked into the curriculum?

in high school?

then they would push us, absolutely

Yeah, ok thanks