I have been on many back channel conversations of late that have led me to reflect on Bateson’s idea that only ‘a difference which makes a difference’ is information. It makes me smile to think that so much of what I read and write may be just noise and not information.
Let me explain.
Just this week a paper that looked at the light and shade of one MOOC was extensively discussed on the web. Jenny offers a balanced view of the discussion in answering some of the commentary. I must say that her description of the reaction to their paper is much kinder than mine would be – I have seen a great deal more defensiveness and unwarranted personal attacks than her post may indicate to the casual reader. Of course, unless you have a Facebook account, you will be unable to see the full conversation. The joys of the not so open web. I digress.
What I see foregrounded in these interactions are categories and the application of those categories to a given idea. Interaction is about whether the reported research applies cMOOCs, or to xMOOCs, but not to our MOOC because it is different. Ah! but this research applies to networks not communities, communities have people and networks have nodes. Networks lack caring, no they don’t. Each position taken can, of course, be defended (and I chose the word purposefully) with a long list of references depending on what your particular perspective and interest might be. Clearly there is value in making distinctions that map a territory. Perhaps there is less value in arguing if my food map is truer than your road map of the same territory. I am not interested in taking a position on the issue here, I learn each day from the wisdom with which Jenny and Frances deal with dialogue online. Read their article and make up your own mind about the value of some of the commentary about the paper.
Personally, I have been led back to an old idea in my knowledge map, that of the expert linchpin. A facilitator role to support individuals navigating the tacit seems an important element in any conversation of what can make these open educational spaces safer for us all.
This is what this post is about and the above is offered only by way of context. It feels to me that, sometimes, after we create our ideal structures, procedures and technologies we start to wonder about where and how people might fit in. Do networks have nodes or people? Do communities care about people or not? To me this reasoning is a little back to front.
What is a difference that has made a difference to me in my journey into open education?
Whatever the category of the online educational event – course, event, happening, un-course, cMOOC, xMOOC, CoP, CoI, LMS based, Connected Course, I could go on…human capacity to categorise and reify knows few bounds – it is the people who take an interest and help me learn that have mattered always. Of course, I may be just an anomaly.
For me it has not been about undiscerning Teletubby Love , no. What took me from being a skeptic about the potential of the open web for learning into a fully fledged participant has been the gift of what I call expert linchpins in each new experience I entered.
I have used that term way back since the days I used to go into companies with a brief to develop ‘expert computer systems’. We went in and always looked for the ‘linchpins’. People who had expertise but also whose expertise was considered indispensable in the system by their colleagues across departments or areas of expertise. At the time I did not know it, but what we wanted to find was experienced practitioners who also knew how to connect and share across the network that was the company. After much searching I managed to track the original paper where I came across this idea. It is old by web standards, 1996. It was research looking at the feasibility of using the internet to extend training in team problem solving. A quaint read with the benefit of hindsight,
“One strategy consisted in the use of a linchpin expert: one member of the trainers’ group who gave all training subsequent to the initial FTF training. This trainer was the communication bridge between the other trainers and the trainees.”
“A central element of the approach was the linchpin expert, a trainer who served as a communication bridge on the Internet between a team of trainers and a team of trainees.”
I note a couple of things in this paper that are relevant to my post here. This linchpin expert is seen as a communication bridge. He or she operates between at least two groups but has the expertise to belong to either.
Of course, we have trialled a similar approach when bringing the open course DS106 into 3M as reported in the Journal of Interactive media in Education. In that paper we talk about a network connector facilitator role,
“In the 3M-DS106 Salon a specialist facilitation role, we refer to as the ‘Salon Patroness’, acts as a supportive network connector both within 3M and outward to the open DS106 community. We believe this role requires full membership of both communities […]. Our 3M-DS106 Salon model incorporates the idea of ‘an open organisational web’ facilitated by [the] network connector who brings together the organisation and open educational resources”
Once you start categorising in this way, in terms of role rather than structure or design, you see that many of those open educational experiences that are successful have this kind of role embedded in their design somewhere.
Simon Thomson in his design for an open online course, after attending the Connected Course MOOC last year, saw this as a way into helping skeptic academics learn about connected learning. He used his unsuccessful attempt to engage colleagues in this MOOC as a way into learning, surveyed them and learnt about their reasons for non-participation. His way to address the objections? Use local facilitators from a given institution who also knew about open education. Simon says, “the course will run with a set of local (to their institution) facilitators with a particular remit to support & guide staff new to open and online. The facilitators will be asked to provide face-to-face support sessions, with a flipped classroom model being the main approach to the facilitation.”
The qualities in the facilitators are similar to those of the expert linchpin or network connectors discussed earlier. Individuals who can be a bridge between domains of expertise because they belong to both and who can act as guides and advisers to participants new to one of the domains without judging their reluctance.
It is people who informally rather than formally took (and continue to take) this role on vis-a-vis my participation who have made the difference to my engagement in open education. It is a kind of virtual sitting-by-nellie approach. Physical Nellie may well be dead in education because it is a very resource intensive method but I see ‘her’ alive well in in the open web (who is Nellie anyway?). It is by taking tentative steps into something with the guidance of an expert linchpin that I have learnt more (so much more) than any qualification might have taught me about open education. It is a kind of role modelling on a case by case basis.
And whilst some in 2003 thought that “role modeling may be the function of mentoring that is least efficiently done in a virtual setting.” These same authors observed that “anecdotal evidence suggests that mentors and proteges in spontaneously developed relationships are taking advantage of this medium as well.” In this mentoring view the expert linchpin is a coach, a friend, a counsellor who support learning. If you are trying to learn to engage in the virtual it makes sense that role modelling becomes possible.
David Hawkridge from the Open University said in 2003 that,
“Without doubt, in modern distance learning the mentor is the ‘human in the machine’. For students, the mentor is the human face in the machine that is the university.”
He also pulls together some distinctions between a tutor and a mentor,
‘Mentoring’ and ‘tutoring’ have acquired similar connotations, but ‘mentor’ is from ‘mens’, Latin for mind, while ‘tutor’ meant a watcher. A watcher is a guardian or protector, but ‘tutor’ was later applied to those who supervised youths in private households or the work of undergraduates at universities like Cambridge. In US universities and colleges in the 19th century, tutors were teachers subordinate to professors, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.”
I like the term expert linchpin because it makes it clear that the role requires experience and indispensability within at least two separate groups. A communication bridge that teaches informally how to join a new domain or field by understanding fully the domain the new participant comes from. This means that the expert linchpin has a greater chance to know how to guide to avoid resistance or drop out.
Jonathan Worth uses the informal mentor role in his Phonar Nation Course. He ‘recruits’ ‘old hands’ online to help out with new participants either in a one-one online relationship, or more akin to Simon’s idea of local facilitators to ‘run a local class’. This is done in the informal network not as a formal element of the course and I think this matters. When I teach networking skills at my business school, I talk to them about the ‘real’ organisational chart and how it matters to tap into it beyond what the formal organisational chart says,
They laugh when they see the image above but it leads to an interesting discussion about how things get done ‘around here’. The expert linchpin is fully embedded in the informal organisational chart of at least 2 domains. This means that the person can pass on to the newbie not just just formal but also the tacit knowledge that will help the newbie learn more than words can say.
When I am asked what is a difference that made a difference for me in joining the DS106 community, I always point to people who unselfishly and informally took me by the hand without setting themselves up as anything more than learners alongside me and taught me ‘how things got done around here’.
The informality mattered because I felt under no pressure to perform as I might with a teacher. The fact that they were ‘doing’ alongside me meant I could learn about the ethos of the community. I now do my best to monitor new arrivals into DS106 and at least offer a hand – no agenda, no positional power plays, just somebody to walk alongside until you get to know the backroads.
Productise that, I dare you.
Update April 2015.
A number of conversations about the introductory paragraphs in this post happened elsewhere on the web. I wanted to make sure I kept the links for those who might want to follow up:
- Frances Bell summed up her views on networking around a scholarly article well. In this blog post she explains her choices to leave the Rhizo14 Facebook Group
- Dave Cormier posted this blog post on Facebook. The comments might be of interest to some
- Simon Ensor posted this blog post on Facebook. The comments might be of interest to some
- I had a conversation with Dave Cormier on Twitter about this post. In the conversation I offered to clarify that this blog offers only personal views. I did not get a response to my question, but may be the link to our interaction will serve to clarify my perspective. I have not changed my mind on any of the content in this post, and I never offered to delete any of its content.
- Heli Hurni wrote an insightful summary about the interactions since the publication of Jenny and Frances’ paper and my blog post.
- Heli also wrote several posts on the paper, here is the link to the first one. It is worth reading the comments as well as the actual blog posts.
- Heli also found another post of mine a year on and commented that she had found it useful, this led Simon to write a long comment on that post which I responded to and might also be of interest to some. It was the post I wrote after I finished #Rhizo14.
In spite of my request to both Dave and Simon that they come to my blog to comment on this post as I was unable to engage on Facebook – I have no account – they haven’t. I would have appreciated being offered the courtesy of being talked to directly and the actual content of the post being addressed rather than the unpleasant circumstances that led to my reflections.
March 3, 2015 at 6:28 pm
Reblogged this on juandon. Innovación y conocimiento.
March 2, 2015 at 5:00 pm
Mariana, Thank you for linking back to my blog post about GoGo. Just an update to say that the “Get Online & Get Open” FOOC (Facilitated On-line Open Course) is being developed in partnership with the Canvas Network. https://www.canvas.net/
I have had a workshop accepted at OER15 http://oer15.oerconf.org/ which will essentially be a course development workshop where the outline course content will be decided and structured.
The plan is to launch the 6 week (approx 2 hours per week) course in September 2015, and there is much to do but I am really excited to finally moving this forward.
I initially wanted to perhaps run a similar setup like Connected Courses – through a WordPress setup, but I am realistic about my own time availability and my own ability (not sure I have enough wordpress expertise quite yet). I think the Canvas network provides me with the openness that I need and more importantly a scalable platform that I can work within.
One aspect of the project that I need to move forward in the short term is getting a list of interested people who firstly might want to work with me on this, but more importantly might want to facilitate local support for learners in their institution/company.
So, if there is anyone reading this who would be interested in getting in touch you can do so via: s.thomson(at)leedsbeckett.ac.uk
February 24, 2015 at 11:20 pm
Lovely, lovely post Mariana. I have a brief and slightly off the wall response so forgive me:) I am thinking about 2 things from your post – role and expert linchpin. What I love about roles is that one person can inhabit different, even contradictory roles. I love the idea of expert linchpins and it makes me think about the way in which Wenger and others have thought about the people and objects that can traverse communities (networks)- I think he called them boundary crossing agents/ objects. As these agents cross boundaries they can be perceived differently from either side of the boundary. So (here’s the off the wall bit) how about thinking about the role that an expert linchpin plays as s/he crosses the boundary. Their role could be contradictory – non-expert on one side of the boundary , expert on the other side. I am thinking about connection – so the newbie to DS106 who learns from and forms a relationship with their mentor (expert linchpin within DS106) discloses something that reveals the newbie as an expert linchpin in a different context. The DS106 newbie could bring their mentor to a new context where they mentor their mentor. I am thinking about a humble model of expertise where we can share our expertise with newbies in one area with the acknowledgement that newbies can become experts in a different context.
February 25, 2015 at 2:33 am
You know, I commented earlier and WordPress ate it and now I’m glad it did because I can jump up and down and clap my hands with Frances and say me too! me too! That’s a lovely Wenger article http://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/n.coutts/pages/Radio4/Articles/wenger2000.pdf .
In my disappearing comment, I described the expert lynchpin in the form of a boundary crosser who is particularly essential in escorting and helping the person who doesn’t necessarily want enter into the “other” world in the first place. Students who need to take the for-credit course, or even more importantly – the hurting person in need of medical care. Medical interpreters are a crucial example of the expert lynchpin. In my experience and in my small town the patients who needed them looked to there for comfort and support. I depended on medical interpreters to give the comfort I would have normally given, but couldn’t and to help me with logistics of it all they helped me develop culturally sensitive plans.
Patient advocates, called “navigators” (love it!), are people who can help the chronically or critically ill patient move through the nightmarish bureaucracy which is our medical system. They step up to show patients the ropes – how to say what to who in order to get what they need. Navigators make things happen until the patients feel confident enough in the system to do it themselves, by themselves.
Boundary crossers – they are observant. They know when to watch, when to give support, when to question, and when to step up to shine a light on the marginalizing behavior of others. Boundary crossers, interpreters and navigators can be everyday heros just by caring.
In my dissertation, I argue that boundary crossing is one of the dispositions connected learning is supposed to promote – we are supposed to be helping students learn the value of boundary crossing and practice their skills of boundary crossing. We, as facilitators of that sort of education ,need to be role models and we need to discuss it explicitly and we need to figure out how to scaffold it effectively. It’s not only ethical practice but good professional practice, too.
February 24, 2015 at 10:06 pm
Expert linchpins – people who can speak both languages are inherently valuable in any sort of initiation or “trying the waters,” particularly if “trying the waters” is not entirely voluntary (such as in for-credit classes). Medical interpreters, particularly ones in small towns where they know the communities and the people in them personally, are so valuable for everyone. They helped the patient understand what was going on. They helped me understand the logistics of how things get done. Patient advocates who help cancer patients thread the bureaucracy – because that’s the last thing they really need to be thinking about but it’s absolutely essential in a realistic sense. The way I’m interpreting your post – and please correct me if I’m wrong–is that the expert linchpin is a reassuring, experienced presence who watches but steps in when needed. They see things, they ask questions, and they care.
I loved Jenny and Frances’ focus on ethics. I love this post. I think we all need to be a little more observant. We all need to take a little more time and be a little more explicit about what we are doing and why. We also need to stand up and say when we don’t think something’s right or to offer praise and encouragement. It doesn’t have to be a lot of work – care is just another disposition.
February 24, 2015 at 8:56 pm
Thanks for sharing this post with me, Mariana (I had originally missed it). I thank you too for all the lovely nuggets nestled within the post –most of which I visited– from the wonderful Gregory Bateson to the Teletubbies 🙂
I was not a participant in Rhizo14 but I’ve been following Frances and Jenny’s blogs throughout the year, at least intermittently — and I engaged in discussion in Frances’s blog this week. I think they highlight some of the essential ethical considerations of open education (not just MOOCs). And like you, I consider Jenny and Frances to be wise and sensitive scholars and role models on these new paths we find ourselves treading.
I thank you for sharing the link to Simon Thomson’s work here. I will be interviewing academic staff soon as part of a survey about open educational practices in higher education. I will definitely read Simon’s blog and make contact with him so that I can learn from his experiences.
And your concept of the expert linchpin? This resonates in many ways — “the bridge between domains of expertise”. It is at the core of many mentor, facilitator and tutor relationships, but your focus on equality / power relations and informal knowledge goes beyond most descriptions of these traditional roles. Thanks for prompting my thinking, in many ways, this evening.
February 24, 2015 at 9:36 pm
I have a way to go from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again! Glad you appreciate my mind walking. I often thought of the Teletubbies when involved in #Rhizo14 in the early days. Whilst the idealistic ‘let’s just all love each very much’ is commendable in intent, in my experience people only love each other very until there is a difference in interpretation and then we need facilitation and agreed norms. I wrote about it back then . I cannot get past the idea that with laissez faire facilitation and no agreed norms of acceptable behaviour educational experiences online are less than what they could be. The ideal that we can ‘let the market’ determine how a collection of individuals interacts works for the resilient but can hurt the vulnerable. As an educator, I feel we have a duty of care to those who might be vulnerable online. May be there are other ways to create safety as people come together – in face to face facilitation I have learnt that T-groups (self organising and with no rules) can cause real harm. Much to think about, no easy answers and hence it matters that Jenny and Frances are asking tough questions. I do think that the expert linchpin facilitator is something I have consistently found in online learning experiences that have supported my journey into connected learning.Thanks so much for taking the time to read my meanderings…