Toward the end of Open Learning ’18, I spotted an article in the Washington Post about a “nationwide college course” on the way democracies decay or erode over time. The Brown University professor who started the course, Rob Blair, began his efforts in the fall of 2017, with three schools in the network. As of this writing, in the spring of 2019, the main course website, democratic-erosion.com, lists thirty-seven schools in the network, three of them outside the United States, as well as one that’s not an institution of higher education, the DC Jail. There’s also an “uncategorized” category, bringing the total categories of participation to thirty-eight. While not all of these participants have contributed to the cross-university blog yet, their presence on the site, and the shared learning resources in the course itself, emphasize the fact that networked learning is at the heart of this ongoing project.
Although the term “open pedagogy” doesn’t appear on the democratic-erosion.com site, I think Dr. Blair’s course and the network built on that foundation certainly deserve to be considered in that light–which is why I immediately contacted him to arrange for an interview.
The interview took place in April, 2018, too late for Open Learning ’18. Nevertheless, while the course network has grown considerably since that time, the course design and the course site are still what they were when I spoke with Rob, so the interview remains relevant (at least in my view). So here, for Open Learning ’19, is our conversation about what I remain convinced is a remarkable example of the value and essential qualities of open pedagogy.
The third iteration of Open Learning begins next week (March 17) with a focus on Open Access and Open Educational Resources. Week Two (March 24-30) emphasizes Open Pedagogy. Week Three launches Open Learning ’19 into the future with a discussion of Open Professional Development, including the idea of openly networked faculty development that was the initial emphasis for Virginia’s participation in the AAC&U’s Faculty Collaborative project, phase II, led and inspired by Dr. Susan Albertine.
This week, then, is the warm-up week, the orientation week, the week in which new folks have a chance to get themselves sorted and situated: sorted as in “what sorts of things should I be ready to do?” and situated as in situated cognition.
First, getting sorted. Here are the primary ways in which you can co-create (i.e., learn from) this experience.
Blogging. Yes, it can be the hardest, for all sorts of reasons. But I put it first because it’s the sort of participation that can yield the greatest benefits. When you blog, you’re present to your fellow learners (and yourself!) with a depth and breadth that can’t really be achieved with shorter and less essayistic forms of participation. Remember that the word “essay” originally means “an attempt.” An essay is not a term paper. Again, with feeling: an essay is not a term paper. It’s an attempt. And yes, I forget that too, all the time. 🙂
Tweeting. Yes, Twitter is fraught in all sorts of ways. But for now, at least, it’s also a place where you can share, link, and connect quickly and effectively. Gather ’round our hashtag the way you’d gather around a warm and welcoming campfire: #openlearning19. Be hospitable. Expect hospitality in return. If you’re new to Twitter, you’ll likely be surprised by how quickly your network grows and becomes an indispensable part of your personal and professional development. I’ve been on Twitter since 2007, and while I’m repulsed and overwhelmed and bewildered by much of what lives in the fetid parts of our global lightspeed telecommunications network, in the last few weeks I’ve also been very strongly reminded that extraordinary things are not only possible in that network but more likely than they would be otherwise.
Hypothesis. Here’s where we gather around a text and read it together, making our annotations and weaving them into conversations. So, set up an hypothes.is account, look at the quick-start guide, and maybe practice a little. Shared online annotation, in an atmosphere of hospitality and a commitment to good faith, can reveal more glorious layers of both commonality and diversity within community.
Open Learning ’19, like the two iterations preceding it, generates resources worth consulting long after the event is over. There are interviews and panel discussions archived on YouTube. There are Twitter chats, annotated documents, blog posts, lush forests of learning full of associative trails. But the resources exist because of the networks from which they emerged, and for Open Learning, the network is the deliverable. That’s the situated part, as in situated cognition. For Open Learning to be meaningful, you must situate yourself within the network. That’s the easiest part and the hardest part, too.
Welcome! We look forward to learning with you, and from you.
To my surprise and delight, a teacher responded, one for whom Spanish was her mother tongue. Several tweets and linked blog posts later, that serendipitous encounter had become a key moment in my life, one I never forgot.
You’ll hear that story, and how it relates to the Engelbart Framework Annotation expedition, in this conversation with Featured Annotator Claudia Ceraso. The conversation was the first time we had interacted in real time, indeed the first time we had ever met face-to-face (albeit via a video interface). The conversation was thus a meeting and a reunion, focused and intensified by the work of thinking about Doug Engelbart’s 1962 research report Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.
Claudia thinks a great deal about language. Her professional life in Argentina, where she lives, centers on teaching English as a foreign language to native Spanish speakers. I was fascinated by her responses to Engelbart’s thoughts on language and/as technology, and deeply moved by her evident love of language and learning.
Claudia has a teacher’s heart and a poet’s soul. I knew this before we spoke, but it was knowledge about, not personal knowledge of. As I go out on a limb, an activity Claudia recommends, I was just above the level of “saber,” and not yet at the level of “conocere.” (Help, Claudia–am I using these words well?) But I had a strong hunch, perhaps even what Claudia teaches me to think of as an “apperception.” Part of what made talking to Claudia such a special experience for me was discovering how right my hunch was, in ways I had not expected.
As you will hear in the interview, there was also the experience of mutual memory in our conversation. Our memory was of a time when the possibilities Doug Engelbart envisioned for “thought vectors in concept space” had seemed closer than ever, a time when the wave of hope and discovery called “Web 2.0” had not quite crested. A time of more blogs and more magical structures built and dwelled within, and not yet a time in which surveillance capitalism and poisonous polarization did not characterize so much of the online experience as they do today. A time when one might discover the unmet friend, and yearn for more connections.
That time is not over yet, but the building is more arduous, more an act of resistance and willed optimism. My conversation with Claudia Ceraso, centered on Engelbart’s dreams of making the world a better place, demonstrates for me that dreamers are not alone, and that the Internet can still be a true meeting place.
