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attending to the shadow of living and learning on the web

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I thank Viv Rolfe for the title of this post! Her post helped me reflect on my own motivations and role what I have been labelling ‘open online education’ in this blog. I responded to Viv’s post with a comment published in Known that I titled Virtues and Vices. In that post I reflected on how sad it was that we had to apologise for asking questions that challenged conventional wisdom and the importance of making ourselves keep asking them,

I am thinking about all of those things, Viv. I also find myself ‘questioning not just openness but my motives behind wanting to contribute to it.’ Some people have already said adios. If we do not take time to consider the vices as well as the virtues, in the spirit of inquiry rather than self-righteousness, many more more might say adios in the not too distant future. Is this how we want it to be?

It is not how I want it to be. My first step in taking action to feel free to say what I want to say is to close comments on this blog. This post talks about how I hope my decision might help me tackle virtues, vices and heffalumps.

Continue reading “What’s not being said and where’s that elephant?” →

Social Networks then and now

As is often the case with my learning online many paths start with a tweet.

In my digital storytelling work I have of late become interested in Twitter Bots. There are wonderful bots as well as crappy spam ones. Just as in the rest of life amongst humans. Some make art for you, others poetry, and yet others make a fine go at sounding wise mediated by text at least, like @everyadage above. I have made several posters illustrating the sayings as they are in that uncanny valley space of almost making sense and that interests me.

The saying made me stop and reflect. The sense it made for me was in connection with the light and shadow side of groups of people who come together to learn (apologies for the long description but other terms such as communities, connections or networks come with too much baggage for my purpose here) in open online learning events. I have written before and often about the implications of a free-for-all ethos where no social or psychological contract is agreed upon or followed through by participants or facilitators.

Continue reading “Social Networks then and now” →

#Thoughtvectors – The quiet MOOC

Just as I realised nearly 2 years on just how useful DS106 Headless 13 had been to my professional life, I am only now realising that the  Thought Vectors on Concept Space MOOC (TVCS in what follows) has been the most impactful MOOC I have taken part  in since my first DS106 experience. What did I say about DS106 recently?

[23/01/2015 13:03:30] Mariana Funes: I just wanted to say thank you! I am so grateful to all I have learnt on DS106 about making stuff…only today I am seeing how useful it has been beyond making art to the business of buying kibble for Colin 🙂 have a good day.

[23/01/2015 17:04:49] Alan Levine: This is the kind of evaluation of a course that means something, it comes much later than the end of a course.

This post is about  TVCS and the impact it has had in my journey to become an open educator. It has done so much and so quietly that only now, a year on, I realise how privileged I have been to be part of something that is showing me in a very practical way the true potential of this form of open learning.

Warning: this is a very long post (when are these short?) as I want to use this as a reminder of our work this semester to learn for next year when the course will run again.

Continue reading “#Thoughtvectors – The quiet MOOC” →

Show, don’t tell!

It seems I have spent my life talking about stuff. My job as a research psychologist and academic was about finding out and writing about it. It strikes me that since choosing to end my full time academic career in 2010 I have entered a different stage in my development. This post is about that; reflecting on the obvious, that becomes obvious only when we are part way down the new road. I have been reminded of a favourite book by Arthur Koestler, ‘The act of creation’. In Koestler’s bisociation theory of creativity the link with analogy is a central focus. All creative activity is viewed as a kind of analogy-formation. He uses the image of a triptych to explore creative domains.

“The three panels of the rounded triptych … indicate three domains of creativity which shade into each other without sharp boundaries: Humour, Discovery, and Art… Each horizontal line across the triptych stands for a pattern of creative activity which is represented on all three panels; … The first is intended to make us laugh; the second to make us understand; the third to make us marvel.” (Koestler, The Act of Creation, p. 27).

The Koestler creativity triptych
The Koestler creativity triptych

The first he calls the Jester, the second the Sage and the third the Artist.  One can view these as unconscious archetypes in the creative process. The sage searches for the ‘ah-ha!’ moment in the world. The jester searches for incongruence or the ‘Ha-Ha!’ moments. The artist searches for that moment when something feels just right, that ‘ah-hh!’ moment.

Continue reading “Show, don’t tell!” →

A human OER

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. […] Once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together. The potential of the mixture of humans and machines working together and communicating through the web could be immense. Tim Berners-Lee (in 1998)

I love the ‘webness of the web’ for learning, I love the relationships I am building and am full of wonder about the kindness and gentle nature of the people in my network. Yet there is a dark side to it all that makes me wonder what role I want to play as I engage in online dialogue with others going forward. Each day I learn a little more about the implicit norms of behaviour a given collection of individuals shapes as they come together online. Decisions about belonging or ‘liking’ are often made on the basis of unstated group norms. I have spent my life offline noticing these patterns and the web does ‘make sense of what we are doing and where we individually fit in’. It is easy for me to see pattern even without engaging in fancy analytics.

As I reflect on my role I notice a world where acronyms abound. This is similar to the insular organisational cultures I visit offline in my consulting work. They are a marker of belonging as much as a marker of exclusion.

I learn about OER, about the OpenEd, about MOOCs of assorted varieties, about the pros and cons of the LMS, I observe confused metaphors about what it means to teach online – is it a course, it is the open web, is it the platform, is it blended or BYOD or all of the above? Am I a teacher, a learner, a peer learner, part of personal or professional learning network? Am I part of a community, a group, a CoP or a network? Can we measure my BC (between centrality) to see if my life is worth living? I can go on. All of this has felt quite unsatisfactory to me as I reflect on how to engage those people who have not made the transition to working in the open web. It is not self-evident that this is a ‘good’ thing and historically it is often just thought a ‘good’ thing by those who stand to benefit from it.

In this post I clarify an online role for me personally that aligns with evolving values and beliefs about open practices.

Continue reading “A human OER” →

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