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Partly, he says, it's about student privacy. But it's also about setting a learning context for paying students, meaning what they see and how their education is structured. If instructors don't control that context, he says, "they're in some sense abdicating their responsibilities to their own students."

Mr. Downes, who writes a well-known education technology blog called OLDaily, permits students to create private groups if they like. But that isn't the default position. He also argues that closed classes provide a lot of latitude for misbehavior, such as prejudice or acting inappropriately toward women. "People say, 'Well I'm a lot more comfortable in private,'" he says. "I sometimes think of that as meaning, 'I'm a lot more comfortable being a jerk in private.'"

distance educators also question how well the open-teaching model, which has been limited mostly to educational-technology courses, would apply to more-traditional subjects that may require more guidance for students.

At the end of the day, the popularity of open classes will depend on whether learning-management software companies like Blackboard make it easy to publish open versions of online courses,

GoingOn Networks' social learning platform allows designers to open up specific areas of the course site to public audiences or restrict other areas of the site to enrolled users. Penn tested the MOOC concept and the technology with a course in Global Environmental Sustainability in 2009. You can view it at https://pennlpscommons.org/.

There are certain foundational skills necessary for learning in an open online environment. Early research indicates the need for learners to practice digital responsibility (including management of personal privacy and respectful behavior), digital literacy (ability to find and vet resources as well as differentiate between valid and questionable resources), organization of online content, collaborating and socializing with subject matter experts and fellow students, and the ability to use online applications to synthesis content and create learning artifacts.

My biggest concern with this model is this: how can we effectively teach research and writing in a "MOOC"? That is, how can teachers provide consistent, reliable and useful feedback to so many students?

There is no doubt a size limit on effective tribal size. Larger numbers of people interacting around an issue tend to clump into clans of 3-12 students when working on a medium sized project or issue. I'd be interested to hear about what social structures emerge among active participants.

I really believe there is a distinction between open teaching and open learning. As a teacher, I could conduct my course in a completely closed environment, but offer my course materials in an open forum that anyone can freely access. Is that open or merely transparent? You begin to see a continnum emerging here. On the other hand, as a highly motivated learner, I could piece together a rich learning experience with open courseware in the absence of a teacher or facilitator. Though at some point, I may have to connect with other learners or subject matter experts who can supplement the materials.

My real issue is the lack of a feedback loop. I'm sure you have learning objectives and some of the students do graded assignments, but the rest is just unknowing wishful thinking.

Chedept wrote "At a minimum, learning is about demonstrated knowledge or skills."Really? So if you have no one to whom to demonstrate knowledge or skills, are you unlearned? Learning need not have such boundaries. Parents of pre-school-aged children see unbounded learning for the joy of discovery every single day.

Open courses may not be practical for all situations (I highly doubt any pedagogical model is the answer to all questions). Some courses require high levels of direct instruction or lab settings.

instead of the instructor being the sole source of guidance and information, she becomes a node among other nodes (important, even critical, but no longer the only or dominant one) in a learning network

I think it is important to remember the number of students that actively participate in the 'course' until completion. In the case of the 'MOOC' considered here, 2300 students enrolled, and less that 10% actively participated. While enrolment might be considered large, participation and contribution is much smaller. Another of these courses started with about 90 enrolled, and finished with about 8 participating. I considered this to be more of a TOOC = tiny online open course, than a MOOC.

I like the comments differentiating "open teaching" from "open learning". I recently gave a talk about the latter, leveraging social networking tools to create a global learning community: http://bit.ly/mmo-learning

I can see no other model that provides the effectiveness of learning on a large enough scale to meet the current challenges in many of the worlds emerging economies. Traditional educational models simply cannot scale rapidly enough.

It will take no additional effort and time for us (Rita Kop, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier) if 500 or 5000 learners from Africa join our open course in September.

Degrees are a statement of quality and a commentary on competence. The person hiring you doesn’t have to know your teacher or what kind of person you are. Instead, they just have to trust the system and the institution that grants the degree. While this scales up nicely it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can be a useful contributor to society.

Open accreditation is the recognition of the interplay between formal and informal learning. The recognition of informal learning is already embedded within the post-secondary institions of several provinces in Canada through prior learning assessment and recognition programs. This is a process that helps adults demonstrate and obtrain recognition for learning they have acquired outside of a formal educational setting. Open accreditation merely takes the idea to its logical conclusion

Degrees are recognition of what you did five-to-ten years ago, but your reputation is a recognition of what you’ve actually done and what you’re doing right now

Of all the open education principles this one is the furthest away from the mainstream. Institutions aren’t going to be rushing to scrap one of their most important metrics in how they receive funding. Businesses expect them and society at large probably isn’t ready for it. However, we have to start having these conversations in order to progress.

Of course, access to education is another powerful reason to examine these concepts. Making education accessible could be an incredibly powerful, democratizing force. Stephen Downes entered this field in order to make education accessible to anyone who wanted it. “The whole reason I’m in this field at all is to increase access to education. For all of recorded human history, education has been proprietary to those who can afford it and I think that is a longstanding injustice. I think we have the capacity and the technology to change that but we also have to change the models and this is an effort to change that model.”

The hollowness and banality of cyberlibertarian conceptions of community are also reflected in their frequent assertions that the goal is finding people in the world who are very much like you, enjoying them for their similarity.

Among political theorists who have written about the matter, the troubling question of how to balance the desires of the individual with the needs of the group is usually understood to be the key to any useful grasp of community life.

within in the larger picture of social development there is a disturbing trend at work. The "Magna Carta," for example, looks forward to "the creation of 'electronic neighborhoods' bound together not by geography but by shared interests." Its authors believe that this holds out the promise of a rich diversity in social life. But what will be the exact content of this diversity? An important feature of life in cyberspace is that it will "allow people to live further away from crowded or dangerous urban areas, and expand family time."

As the picture clarifies, what appears is diversity achieved through segregation. Away from the racial and class conflicts that afflict the cities, sheltered in a comfortable cyberniche of one's social peers, the Third Wave society offers electronic equivalents of the gated communities and architectural barriers that offer the well-to-do freedom from troubles associated with urban underclass

the geographical confines of urban space and the needs of social organization required that an effort be made to find constructive ways of living together. Is the promise of networked computing that people (or at least the wealthy) will now be released from this task?

The shallowness evident in cyberlibertarian conceptions of community are echoed in their views of other key themes in social and political thought. Their imaginings of on-line democracy, for example

But again, the focus of these writings is never community, democracy, equality, or citizenship in the world at large sense, only faint echoes of these matters in the on-line realm.

n that light, many of the most interesting questions for speculation and research have to do with the boundaries between conventional practices and institutions and those being created on the Net. Rather than proclaim community, democracy, citizenship it would be better to study these boundaries, to think about how communities are likely to be affected by the arrival of networked computing and what a reasonable response would be.

But before we seize the advantage, shifting our purchases to Internet vendors, we need to recognize a hidden price we may end up paying: the demise of traditional shops.

Some will argue that fast search engines supplemented by and on-line help desk can replace the human depth that traditional stores have to offer. But this reflects an impoverished understanding of what the social life of books involves

The benefit bookstores and other local shops offer individuals is matched by the way the serve as anchors for the civic culture of our towns and cities.

This suggests that in the age of global communications we will have to become more judicious about where and how we make purchases. In the interest of sustaining living communities, it makes sense to avoid Internet net commerce altogether when there are reasonable, local sources of supply. This is not only a question of altruism, but of self-interest broadly informed. The short term advantage of sending to a computer data bank in Seattle for a bargain priced book to be read thousands of miles away makes no sense if the action contributes to a depleted economy down the street, undermining the integrity of community life.

That suggests that even the most seemingly inconsequential applications and uses of innovations in networked computing be scrutinized and judged in the light of what could be important moral and political consequences

That suggests that even the most seemingly inconsequential applications and uses of innovations in networked computing be scrutinized and judged in the light of what could be important moral and political consequences

That suggests that even the most seemingly inconsequential applications and uses of innovations in networked computing be scrutinized and judged in the light of what could be important moral and political consequences

That suggests that e

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What kinds of personal practices, social relations, legal and

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n case after case, the move to computerize and digitize means that many preexisting cultural forms have suddenly gone liquid, losing their former shape as they are retailored for computerized expression. As new patterns solidify, both useful artifacts and the texture of human relations that surrounds them are often much different from what existed previously. This process amounts to a vast, ongoing experiment whose long term ramifications no one fully comprehends.

One of the changes in our world that characterizes the late twentieth century is the digital transformation of an astonishingly wide range of material artifacts interwoven with social practices. In one location after another, people are saying in effect: Let us take what exists now and restructure or replace it in digital format.

a widely popular ideology that dominates much of today's discussion on networked computing. A suitable name for this philosophy is cyberlibertarianism, a collection of ideas that links ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics in the years to come.

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, and lasting institutions will emerge from this

More importantly, what kinds of practices, relations, rules, and institutions do we want to emerge in these settings.

Any attempt to philosophize about computers and society must somehow come to terms with the wide appeal of this widespread perspective, its challenges and shortcomings.

The first and most central characteristic of cyberlibertarian world view is what amounts to a whole hearted embrace of technological determinism. This is not the generalized determinism of earlier writings on technology and culture, but one specifically tailored to the arrival of the electronic technologies of the late twentieth century. In harmony with the earlier determinist theories, however, the cyberlibertarians hold that we are driven by necessities that emerge from the development of the new technology and from nowhere else.

To describe these changes, cyberlibertarians use familiar terms of inevitable, irresistible, world-transforming change.

In this perspective, the dynamism of digital technology is our true destiny

There is no time to pause, reflect or ask for more influence in shaping these developments. Enormous feats of quick adaptation are required of all of us just to respond to the requirements the new technology casts upon us each day. In the writings of cyberlibertarians those able to rise to the challenge are the champions of the coming millennium. The rest are fated to languish in the dust.

rom the standpoint of contemporary social theory, there is a wonderful irony here. For the past twenty years sociologists and historians have been busily at work trying to defeatdefeat what they saw as an unwarranted determinism in earlier interpretations of the interactions between culture and technology. In one way or another most scholars believe in the social construction or social shaping of technology in which outcomes are negotiated among a variety of actors with complex motives. It is interesting to note how little such understanding enters libertarian writings on cyberspace

In fact, increasingly popular among cyberlibertarians is the conclusion that rapid development of artificial things amounts to a kind of evolution that can be explained in quasi-biological terms

Another key theme in this emerging ideology is that of radical individualism.

Writings of cyberlibertarians revel in prospects for ecstatic self-fulfillment in cyberspace and emphasize the need for individuals to disburden themselves of encumbrances that might hinder the pursuit of rational self-interest. The experiential realm of digital devices and networked computing offers endless opportunities for achieving wealth, power and sensual pleasure. Because inherited structures of social, political, and economic organization pose barriers to the exercise of personal power and self-realization, they simply must be removed.

Yet another element in this vision of the world perhaps could well have been placed at the top of the list. Crucial to cyberlibertarian ideology are concepts of supply-side, free market capitalism, the school of thought reformulated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics.

As Nicolas Negroponte writes in Wired, , "I do believe that being digital is positive. It can flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people..." (Negroponte, 182)

"It is clear," the Magna Carta exclaims, "that cyberspace will play an important role knitting together the diverse communities of tomorrow, facilitating the creation of 'electronic neighborhoods' bound together not by geography but by shared interests." (Magna Carta)

By the same token, democracy will flourish as people use computer communication to debate issues, publicize positions, organize movements, participate in elections and perhaps eventually vote on line

We see here the coalescence of an ideology that is already extremely influential, one likely to have substantial influence in years to come. Indeed, there seems to be no coherent, widely shared philosophy of cyberspace that offers much of an alternative.

the cyberlibertarian position offers a vision that many middle and upper class professionals find coherent and appealing.

As is generally true of ideologies, this framework of thought serves to both illuminate and obscure.

it illuminates what are ultimately power fantasies that involve radical self-tranformation and the reinvention of society in directions assumed to be entirely favorable. But this ideology obfuscates a great many basic changes that underlie the creation of new practices, relations and institutions as digital technology and social life are increasingly woven together.

One especially foggy area in cyberlibertarian rhetoric is its depiction of matters of power and distribution. Who stands to gain and who will lose in the transformations now underway?

Characteristic of this way of thinking is a tendency to conflate the activities of freedom seeking individuals with the operations of enormous, profit seeking business firms.

As long as we are getting rapid economic growth and increased access to broad bandwidth, all is well. To raise questions about emerging concentrations of wealth and power around the new technologies would only detract from the mood of celebration.

The combined emphasis upon radical individualism, enthusiasm for free market economy, disdain for the role of government, and enthusiasm for the power of business firms places the cyberlibertarian perspective strongly within the context of right wing political thought

It is interesting to speculate about how it happened that prominent views about computing and society have become associated with a political agenda of the far right.

An important first step, in my view, is to relocate the starting point for the whole discussion about society and networked computing.

yberlibertarians and other enthusiasts of cyberspace,

observes what is presently happening in the realm of networked computing and in the development of a rapidly evolving global technosphere. Then one chooses an impressive term: community or democracy, or citizenship or equality or some other lovely concept to describe aspects of what one observes. Other contexts in which those terms have meaning, contexts in history, philosophy and contemporary experience, need not enter the picture. No, they are not the target.

So one of the most interesting things about technology is that it redefines our language. It gives us different meanings of older words, and very often we're not quite as aware as we should be of how that process is working.

All technological change is what I call a Faustian bargain. It gives you something, but it also taketh away something. Now, in America -- and this is one of the reasons I thought I should write this book -- we tend to be extremely enthusiastic about technology, about what it is going to bring us, so that almost every American, in considering anything from lasers to computers to television, can tell you for a half hour or more what this new technology will do for us. But there are very few people who have ever considered what a new technology will undo.

Europeans look at this, and they ask themselves this question, which is a good question: "Is it possible for us to maximize the benefits of new technologies while minimizing some of the negative consequences? Can we, through education or political action or social policy, inhibit technology from destroying that which we wish to preserve?" That's a good question, and I don't know the answer to it and they don't know the answer to it, but they're asking it.

f you put television into America in 1946, by 1960 you don't have America just "plus television", but a new kind of America, so that our social relations are altered and our attitudes toward childhood are altered and our political system is altered and we get new meanings of old words and so on.

Western culture had about 300 years to adapt itself to the printing press. So we developed new forms of economic life, new political ideas, new notions about education -- all organized around the printing press. But in our own time, our situation is much more difficult to cope with because almost daily, it seems, new technologies come on the scene and our social institutions don't have time to assimilate them and reorganize themselves to accommodate the demands of the technology.

If we devote all of our resources and our psychic energies to making bigger and better machinery and designing better techniques, will we become less human in some sort of traditional way of defining that?

there's a tendency of people to think that new technology is additive, and I think new technologies are ecological. What I mean is, that if you put the printing press into Europe in the mid 15th century, you don't have 50 years later Europe plus the printing press. You have a new Europe because everything gets changed -- the political system, the religious system and so on.

I like to put this sort of hypothetical issue to people. Suppose it were 1906 and we knew what we know now about the automobile with a combustion engine and we were able to have a conversation about it, a national conversation, and someone listed for us all of the benefits of the automobile, which are many, and then all of the deficits, including that it would poison our air and choke our cities and create the suburbs -- some people would put on that side, but I might put on this side -- and then we said, "Let's discuss this and then we'll have a plebiscite. We now know what it will do, and we know what it will undo." I think most Americans would say, "Let's go ahead with it anyway." But someone is bound to say, "Let's go ahead with it, but is there anything we could do to reduce this list over here, to minimize the negative consequences?" Well, in 1906, if we had had such a conversation, even with limited knowledge, there probably were things we could have done to reduce the negative items on the list. When television came along, it would have been, in theory, possible to have the same conversation. "What are the benefits, what are the deficits? Let's talk about it and then let's see is there anything we can plan to do that would minimize the deficits?" Well, we didn't have such a conversation, and with the computers now, we're not having such a conversation. All we hear is what they will do for us. We don't hear what they will undo. So one of the purposes of a book like this was to see if it's possible to start such a conversation and make us more sophisticated in our approach to our new technologies and, for that matter, old technologies.

I think what most people would call Third World countries would be roughly what we might mean by a tool-using culture; that is, people whose symbolic world -- their politics, their religion, their education -- are not commanded and dominated by technology. They have tools. They invent tools, but they always invent their tools to solve problems in the physical world, but they do not let the tools control their social and symbolic lives.

Technocracy is a culture in which you have serious technology competing with a more traditional social and symbolic world.

I don't think that sociology, psychology and anthropology are sciences, and I try to make a distinction between science and those activities. In fact, I even think, Brian, economics really is a branch of moral theology and should be taught more in divinity schools than in universities. But it does disturb me that so many people have such faith in the subjects that are called social science and go to experts to find out how to raise children and how to fall in love and how to make friends, as if they believe that because these subjects are "sciences" -- in quotes here -- that they are getting verifiable, indisputable truths about the world. So I use social science as an example of really a technique that is part of the machinery of technopoly.

if you don't teach the history of what we once knew about biology or economics or even mathematics, then learning or information becomes a kind of consumer product. Facts become like something you're selling. I think what we want here is for the young to understand that what we think we know at any given time, first of all, is a product of what we once thought we knew. It comes from someplace and that in the future, it will itself change. So the idea is for a teacher to try to show the young that learning is an historical process and that anything that we think we know now will probably be modified in the future. History is wonderfully good for this. History is almost the best consciousness-raising subject that we have available for that.

actually, education *is* an acquisitive process.

Learning, however, *is not* an acquisitive process. We learn constantly, experientially, socially. I can sit in a lecture hall for an hour and leave with a dramatically different understanding of a topic than the professor wanted me to have.

MOOCs, in contrast to traditional education, require engaged, active, and participative learners.

An open course requires students to comment, to create, and to engage with others. Passivity reduces the quality of learning as most learning occurs in the process of doing, creating, sharing, and dialoguing.

Social networked learning has a long history – information flows in social networks, parents teach their children, masters teach apprentices.

Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding

Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time.