Time for a SmOOC?

Motivated by Bon Stewart's efforts to unpack the MOOC buzzword and now by Jenny Mackness' thoughts about the explosion of MOOCs in higher education, I want to say a bit more about the appropriation of MOOCs by universities and corporations.

One could be kind to the universities that are, in Mackness' words, "jumping on the MOOC bandwagon at an alarming rate," and say that at least they recognize a good new wine when they see it and that they are putting the new wine into old skins mostly because that's what they know how to do, but really, I don't know how kind such a comment would be, and anyway, I'm not sure the universities are that benign (used mostly in the medical sense of not being malignant). A more cynical train of thought might suggest that we are witnessing a movement by the forces of control to counter and appropriate, to quote the blog Learning Spaces, "smooth spaces where nomadic thinking can occur, and is indeed encouraged."

The writer of Learning Spaces (BTW, I don't know the name of this person. Can anyone tell me? Thanks) argues that corporatisation of education reflects a shift from disciplinary societies to societies of control, as described by Gilles Deleuze in his article Postscript on the Societies of Control (1992). Learning Spaces says, "In education this [control] is characterised through dataveillance and ever more strict frameworks for accountability, particularly through the work of Ofsted. However, whilst restrictions and creeping privatisation have led to a loss of professionalism and increasing homogenisation of the educative process, Deleuzean geophilosophy emphasises the potential for individuals and groups to create alternative spaces for professional creativity and debate." I believe that MOOCs began as explorations "for individuals and groups to create alternative spaces for professional creativity and debate." I think this more open space is core to the idea of MOOCs (part of the DNA), and that most of us are suspect of what we see as the compromise of this open space by recent versions of MOOCs rolled out by more corporate bodies. I think that Bon Stewart, Jenny Mackness, and others will agree. Stewart notes that MOOCs "grew, initially, as learning networks of emergent knowledge focused around educational technologies: in other words, around complexity and disruptive innovation in higher ed." Mackness says about the very first MOOC, CCK08, that it "was an experiment in getting people to think about learning differently." We don't see this same openness in some of the latest, most notorious versions of MOOCs.


The openness of MOOCs means that MOOCs can be hijacked for different purposes. This is intentional, I think. The idea is for people, or even institutions, to connect freely to a MOOC and to use it for their own educational purposes. I hijacked a couple of the MOOCs I engaged, using them as supplemental readings and discussion springboards for a faculty development program in writing across the curriculum. A few of the faculty at my local university actually liked the hijack enough that they enrolled themselves into the MOOCs and into subsequent MOOCs.


Others, particularly corporations and corporatized institutions, will hijack MOOCs and do things with them that we early MOOCers are not likely to appreciate. I find a possible explanation for this misappropriation in Deleuze's essay Postscript on the Societies of Control and in Learning Spaces educational riff on that essay. Deleuze says that society is shifting from what Foucault called disciplinary societies with its various enclosed environments (prisons, hospitals, families, factories, schools, etc.), each with its own rules and hierarchical structures to what Deleuze calls societies of control, in which individuals are turned into dividuals, separate data streams captured and manipulated by the corporations that own the data streams (Google, Facebook, Apple, international banks come immediately to mind). As Deleuze succinctly says, "Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt." Deleuze does not appear to see this as progress. For our argument, he sees some dire possibilities for education: "Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation."


This line of thought seems to suggest that we should expect the educational corporations to hijack MOOCs for the purpose of establishing their controls over the data streams that MOOCs generate. We should also expect old-style schools to reject MOOCs as they try to preserve their enclosed and managed spaces. What Mackness calls cognitivist MOOCs, then, are likely to be threatened from two directions:

1. The old-style schools (disciplinary societies) will seek to control MOOCs either by blocking MOOCs from their enclosed spaces (forbidding laptops and smartphones in the classroom), or by bringing MOOCs into their enclosed spaces where they can manage them as they've managed things for two hundred years.
2. The new-style schools (societies of control) will seek to control MOOCs by extending the mechanisms of control (salary, marketing, and validation, for example) that ironically use the same technological substrate as MOOCs: modern computers and networks.

I don't think the old-style schools are any threat to MOOCs. As Deleuze says of all old-school, disciplinary societies: "We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. … The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the _societies of control_, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies." The old schools will not survive the steamroller that Deleuze calls the societies of control.

I think the new-style schools, however, are a great threat to connectivist MOOCs. They understand and use technology that enables MOOCs of any stripe, and they believe (unlike the old-schools) that their very life depends on establishing control over the data streams that open educational resources such as MOOCs create.

All is not bleak, however. Deleuze notes that this period of transition from disciplinary societies to societies of control holds real promise as well as peril. As new regimes of control emerge in home, school, factory, and hospital: 

There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

I think, then, that our best new weapons are more connectivist MOOCs that "express new freedom," knowing full well that others will offer near enemies: MOOCs that establish control over the various data streams that feed into and out of a MOOC. I especially like Jenny Mackness' idea of SmOOCs, or small open online courses. I think it's time to offer a SmOOC. It looks like a fine, new weapon to me.

#change11 Rhizomatic Knowing

I woke up this Sunday morning thinking about rhizomatic knowing, but the house is full of guests and the coffee is already on, so I don't have long to write.

I want to flash on something that Bon Stewart calls a helicopter view of reality and that I refer to as a God view (Deconstruction: I'm the child of a Pentecostal minister, schooled on the church pew since birth, so God is almost always somewhere in any discussion I have), because this assumed position or vantage point has much to say about what we think we know.

As you may have noticed, I like working with metaphors, or images, as a gateway into thought, so let's play. Envision your life as a plate of spaghetti, and yourself as one noodle in that plate, with a history (a long and happy one, we hope) twisting and intertwining with all the other noodles in your life. Got the image? Ok, find your noodle, the noodle that will represent your life, and for the sake of the game, place your noodle somewhere in the middle of the spaghetti mess.

If you are like most of us, you are almost certainly viewing the plate of spaghetti and your own life from outside, from up above, from a helicopter view, or a God view. From this view, you can see the whole plate of spaghetti, even the table it sits on, and your noodle from start (birth) to finish (death), and you can meticulously identify each twist and turn and convolution in the string of your life, and you can point to, name, and quantify each point of contact with all the other noodles on your plate. You can determine which other noodles (or meatballs, but let's not push this metaphor too far) had significant, lasting impacts on your life. You can make assessments about why things turned out as they did. From this view, you can see and trace causes and effects. This is very useful.

It is also a fiction. You are not God, you don't even have a helicopter. I think this is one of the main points Deleuze and Guattari are trying to make. Giving yourself Godview is a fiction—a sometimes useful fiction, but always a fiction.

To envision what you can actually see in your plate of spaghetti, you have to float down from your privileged vantage point on High and take your place along one point on your noodle. That point is conveniently called Now. Okay, from this point, look about yourself at the plate of spaghetti. It should look very different, Now and Here. You peer back down the length of your noodle, and it twists and turns like a goat path into the past. You can no longer see your birth. You can't see the noodles that impacted you then, though you are reasonably sure your mother was there and likely your father, at least for one brief and shining moment. You look forward along the length of your noodle into the future. Hmm … now you can see even less as your noodle takes a sharp veer into tomorrow. So you look about at the various other noodles (people, events, sounds, colors, countries) intersecting with you at Now, and all those noodles have their own obscure trajectories, a few of which you have some memory, but most of which are just obscure. This is your real, actual view of life. This is what Deleuze and Guattari want to remind you of: that life is a complicated mess of interwoven noodles, a rhizome.

I use the term complicated just here on purpose: complicated suggests to me the intricate arrangement of  many parts. But let's take the plate of spaghetti one iteration beyond by making it not only complicated but complex. Take all those static noodles in the plate of spaghetti and put them in motion so that they become a roiling mass of worms or snakes. Or if you find that image too distasteful, then turn each noodle into an electric arc, a streaming asteroid, a flaming, flashing star, whatever dynamic image works for you, but just put the whole plate in motion so that each once static noodle begins to make its way through the mass of other noodles, being acted upon and in turn acting upon others. Think about the effects of electromagnetic forces that operate powerfully over short distances (physical, emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic distances) and the gravitational forces that operate over all distances so that your one noodle or arc is pushed and pulled—certainly by the noodles closest to you (family, colleagues, friends, favorite philosophies, etc.) but ultimately by every other noodle in the spaghetti mass. Now, extend your plate of spaghetti out in all directions to encompass all of the Universe and all of history because all of that has exerted some gravitational influence on you in the Here and Now. And because you are likely a teacher, complexify your plate of spaghetti by adding it to the thirty other plates of spaghetti from your students, and then look at me squarely and tell me that you really understand all of this roiling, arcing, flashing, dynamic mess/mass.

Well, I don't think you do. I'm positive that I don't. Rather, we build our fictions through abstractions, focuses, reductions, bulbs, agglomerations, tubers, shoots, and so forth, that help us filter the swelter of reality into something that makes sense, into something that is manageable. It's the best we can do, but—and this is another strong point from Deleuze and Guattari—this fiction-making process is always an exercise of power. We create these fictional systems for ourselves and for others. We have to, but it is always an exercise of power however well intentioned: an attempt to wrangle reality, the rhizome, into a more manageable shape, often into our own image. This fascist tendency (D&G's term) is always there, and the rhizome always eventually flows around it. The Greek gods, kings and kingdoms, democracy, algebra, the Free Market, English, Spanish, Impressionistic painting, behaviorism, constructivism, connectivism, and rhizomatic learning have all been more or less useful fictions at one time or another. Deleuze and Guattari do not argue that we should avoid this fiction-making. Rather, they argue that we should never forget that these things are fictions. They are more or less useful ways of engaging reality—the Rhizome—but they never capture reality. They never really give us the total control over ourselves, others, and the World that we seek.

To my mind, this is a profound spiritual truth expressed in totally secular terms. And you can quite reasonably ask, so what? Well, that's another post … or ten. But people are stirring. Time to go.