Forcing or Guiding According to Necessity?
In a post that is meant to go in a different– and interesting– direction regarding PLEs, Dave Cormier writes:
“Why, you might ask, are we doing this course in a closed fashion? Well, I also happen to think that forcing people to work in the open without a clear sense of the implication of that action is also unfair. If people choose to blog and refer us to that work by using the course tag, and, maybe, referring to it in the blog posts… then that’s great. If they choose, for any number of reasons, that they prefer to keep all their work to themselves, that is also their choice. I don’t think its a good choice, I think that work shared is more valuable and more likely to come back to you better than when you started… I think that the best knowledge is created in an interaction… a ‘public PLE’ but that is not for me to decide for someone else.”
To which I have to ask: really? All work? All the time? Is this a common sentiment?
I guess this goes to show how out of touch I am, but I see an inherent contradiction in this position. Educators can talk about– and demonstrate with examples of– the “implication” of sharing and working in the open until they are blue in the face… but this is a perfect example where experiential learning is often a necessity.
Ideally a student will choose to share and work in the open on their own– I’m not advocating being an ogre and forcing all openness all the time– but it doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes performances are necessarily command performances; that’s not a bad thing. In my experience, as many of the most reluctant come to find value in the process of sharing and working in an open environment– as evidenced both by what they say and their continued activity– as those who decide to do so on their own.
I see teaching and learning in an open environment as one in which teachers are akin to chartered wilderness guides. To the extent possible, productive and safe, a good guide will let their charges take the lead and facilitate the experiences they seek. But there are necessary and desired outcomes that lie at the end of hazy and sometimes unseen paths, and dangers that trump a client’s desire, inclination and instinct. At those times it is precisely our job as an educator to “decide for” our students. This includes taking part in an open environment– which isn’t just an educational condition, but increasingly a condition of being active in the world outside of the educational enterprise– just as it includes many other performances and engagements and approaches that learners would be unlikely to engage in if left wholly to their own devices.
Of course, not all courses have engagement outside the walls of the class as a required part of the process in terms of outcome or philosophy. It isn’t necessary, in my opinion, to have any open processes to have a fantastic learning experience. But the negative spin here– the implication that openness is somehow different from other required elements or activities and thus worthy of invoking the negative descriptions of forcing and deciding for– is to ignore the interplay between the reality of the world in which students desire and choose to operate and the larger context in which desire and choice are not the only– and sometimes not even the most important– characteristics they need to understand and be prepared for.
December 5th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Hey Chris,
Thanks for getting in on this conversation Chris this is really going to help my modelling of openness
It’s not really a question of ignoring it… (reality) it’s a question of respect. I’ve been teaching mostly adult professionals, who, for various reasons, have concerns about online identities. My blog for the course is open (as you noticed) and through this blog post and some of the excellent comments that came along with that post they are seeing the advantages of open learnign for themselves. They are also part of a larger certificate program where they will have ample opportunity to try out open learning for themselves at future points.
I have, since I started following this policy, had only two students who decided that they didn’t want their work opened to the world (see http://edugrids.org for the first class) their concerns would not have been concerns for me, but they thought of their learning process as too personal for that kind of sharing.
You say that it is our jobs to ‘make decisions’ for our learners… I’m not so sure that this is the kind of decision that I’m willing to make. I’m certainly willing to decide what i think my students should be choosing from… but i hesitate to decide what they should choose… that feels a little transmissiony for me, where what I’m trying to do is teach them to decide for themselves. I very much hope they decide to ‘iterate towards openness’ but openness enforced kinda feels like throwing the cat outside, they’ll probably like it, but they’re far happier if they decide for themselves.
December 6th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Chris (and Dave)–perhaps I should really be leaving this comment over on Dave’s blog—
In my formal teaching days, I took a slightly different tack from either of you:
My approach (and we’re talking with undergraduates here) was to have a conversation about openness and connectedness the first day of the semester, and as a group decide on the how “open” we’d go and why. This conversation set us up as a learning community from the get-go, rather than a motley assortment of individuals in adjacent learning monologues. Every semester (fall-2001 to the spring of 2008) each group of students realized that embarrassing and awkward as it felt early on to do their blogging out for all the world to see and comment on, it made their work real to have it part of the larger conversation. It held them to a higher standard. They also noted that an individual should have the right to keep any post private or closed. As their guide and mentor, I made sure they considered the pros and cons of openness, as well as ways to keep themselves and their identities safe.
That conversation set the tone for the rest of semester of the class as a community of practice collaborating in reciprocal apprenticeships with me as the consulting expert and co-evaluator.
~bg
December 6th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Chris, Dave and Barbara,
Your points are all interesting to note and share.
@Chris, learners are all different, some prefer to be opened, some others prefer to be closed, at least at the start of the course. Would it be easy to do it as suggested:”At those times it is precisely our job as an educator to “decide for” our students”? Would that benefit the students in the long run? Would the learners ultimately need to make her own decisions?
@Dave, if opennes is an issue, what do you think would be a long term solution?
@Barbara, that was a superb solution. What were your learners’ reaction to the community of practice? Are your learners also in connection with the outside communities?
I have created a few posts on blogging and digital identity on http://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com
Your comments are welcome.
John
December 7th, 2008 at 7:14 am
What I find interesting is why this is being made into an either/or – “openness” (by which I take to mean ‘not behind a password protected LMS, open to be read and ideally commented on by all’) is not equivalent to “my online identity” – cf. anonymous blogs. Certainly, you’d need to indicate *somewhere* (probably in the ‘closed’ environment) that the blog was *yours*, but to Google and the rest of the world, it could remain anonymous and this not negatively impact your ‘real’ online identity. Now I do think writing anonymously will likely impact the kind of feedback and interactions (and resulting network) you are able to build, and I am not advocating it as THE way to go, but you at least retain the possibility of *some* of the benefits of network effects, whereas in the “walled garden” you almost by definition forsake these. Does this make any sense? It’s 6am and I’ve been up since 4am travelling, yawn!
December 8th, 2008 at 8:43 am
@barbara: Having lived the role of the shy student, I hardly think it’s fair to assume that a group discussion on the first day of class can fairly represent a consensus of students. That said, I don’t know that I can think of a better solution than yours, since at least everyone knows what’s expected.
I think I’m in the same camp as @dave:
“I’m certainly willing to decide what i think my students should be choosing from… but i hesitate to decide what they should choose… that feels a little transmissiony for me, where what I’m trying to do is teach them to decide for themselves.”
I don’t think you can dismiss the sentiment of openness being forced upon students when that’s exactly how reluctant students will perceive it. Are there times when a student is wholly justified in wanting to stay off the grid? Probably so. @scott’s anonymous blogs may be an adequate middle-ground, I don’t know.
December 8th, 2008 at 9:50 am
@Dave: Let me be clear that I believe it is SOMETIMES an educator’s job to make a decision for student(s) and to “force” them outside of their comfort zone. Other than that, I tend to agree with your approach of letting them come to it for themselves. But a lot depends on context– who the students are, what the class is meant to achieve. And if it were important to the educational experience, I’d likely handle the two students who were reluctant by still requiring their participation but allowing them to do so using an identity known only in class. FERPA might even require that for all I know!
@Barbara As you might expect, this makes sense to me. Again, the context of the class is important… I often teach classes in an environment where the class I am teaching will be the only significant experience with the participatory web– but it remains important (and will be critical) for many of them later. In that context I can’t ignore it… however, the most important of what I think must be learned experientially can be learned without revealing their “real” identity. And of course, as I tried to be careful to note, I’m not talking about opening up ALL work.
@Sui I can’t ignore the evidence– and not a small amount– that reluctant students who face a requirement to participate end up as often enthusiastic and continuing users as those who come ready to go out in the open. There’s a large amount of craft and practice in the art of being a living, breathing, participatory digital being. A lot of which can (must) be learned through continued engagement and repetition… it’s amazing how “going through the motions” so often takes a student where they want and need to go. I wouldn’t let a student taking a course in forms of poetry to skip writing the forms they aren’t comfortable with, I wouldn’t tell a student driver that it’s OK if they don’t want to leave the parking lot. If that makes me insensitive and old-school, so be it– I count on the satisfaction of students and seeing what works.
@sleslie Exactly.
@all It seems a bit at odds to me to recognize how important these mechanisms and affordances and skills are and then maintain that they cannot be in any way required. That’s what I was responding to– the blanket assertion that it’s always wrong to require an element of openness and participation and, from that, the deeper question about requirements and “forcing.” The fact is, particularly with students coming in who are socialized into a particular, passive, broadcast model of learning, I’m not about to shy away from levering them out of their comfort zone. Students don’t necessarily know what will work, and what will work isn’t necessarily knowable without experience…
December 8th, 2008 at 10:05 am
@Brian even if we disagree in some parts, I completely agree that it is fair and necessary to be as clear as possible about what’s expected.
I do allow students to use an option of anonymity to the outside world… interestingly most abandon that anonymity well before the end of the course. It’s not a perfect method, but if I had to quantify it I’d say 80% of what is important is learned and understood that way.
The thing is, if the skills inherent in an open education engagement are as important as I believe they are, then how can I approach them as an “option” to be acquired according to student preferences, any more than I could teach an intro physics course and allow Newton’s laws to be “optional?”
I have to say, though, that I’ve yet to have a student who refused to participate at all, even anonymously, and I would say only about 1/10 choose that option. I have had students avoid– and others wait for– my courses *because* of those requirements (even when it turns out what they’d heard was wrong)!
December 8th, 2008 at 10:25 am
@chris, I spoke a little too quickly — I have a bad habit of finding a counter-argument before I really decide on my own opinion. I think I agree with you more than I first sounded like
.
If you’re teaching an open course, and that’s the expectation from the get-go, then the student can take that as part of the whole package, all or nothing. Maybe that’s an unfair expectation for a given student body, but if so someone up the line should step in instead of requiring overly defensive course development. I’m coming from this whole open education space from a software development history, where it’s a knee-jerk reaction to consider your edge cases, so my mind jumps right to the exceptions.
I still think there are going to be times when those exceptions occur, but they will be — well, the exceptions, and so can be handled differently. It’s probably good practice to acknowledge that exceptions exist (like you did), while not designing the entire solution around those rarities.
FERPA (bless their souls) would hardly accept a comment like “I’ve yet to have student who…”, but that’s their problem. You make a great point, that if you feel strongly enough to push oppenness in your courses, as long as that’s the expectation up-front, then it’s not fair to have to soften its importance because of a few extreme edge cases. It doesn’t surprise me at all that most student would embrace that openness as the course progresses.
December 8th, 2008 at 10:53 am
@Brian writes “I spoke a little too quickly — I have a bad habit of finding a counter-argument before I really decide on my own opinion.”
I think we might be related! I really appreciate your comments… and those from others. I’m always learning…
December 10th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Transparency is not an easy subject…
Where I work, part of what educators try to do is help students develop a professional identity that will help them in their future career. This is pretty common to many kinds of “professional” education, even if its not explicitly recognised as part of the university’s job.
A significant part of how educators support this is through modelling – opening up their own professional practice to their students.
(Q: How do we get students to “see” behaviours like hovering over the submit button before committing a potentially unhelpful remark to the web, or googling something mid-tweet just to check they’re not making an idiot of themselves? Providing direct guidance or checklists seems unsubtle)
I wouldn’t expect students to work in the open from day one, but I’d expect them to get the message when surrounded by models of practice. I think you’re correct that for some you really do have to push. Thats where an educator’s professional judgement kicks in, and dilettantes like me have to back off.