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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

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.

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.