Assessing Complex Systems and Sonnet 73

As my own views about education continue to emerge, I understand them best within the context of the conversation about complexity—complexity as a large, transdisciplinary conversation that has been emerging for centuries, but that was made unavoidable by the emergence of relativity and quantum physics at the beginning of the 20th century. The fact that I just used a form of the term emerge three times in a single sentence suggests how much Complexity has informed my thinking. As I am so very fond of following rabbit holes, it helps me from time to time to gather my thoughts to see if something coherent emerges. See?

I've been reading through a series of articles about complexity and the limits of knowledge from a 2005 special edition of Futures. I recommend it to anyone interested in either complexity or knowledge or the knowledge of complexity or the complexity of knowledge. You can really get tangled up, or at least I can. So I want to do a bit of untangling.

At the largest scale I can think about, complexity is that zone of engagement between the open-ended future and the closed past. We call that zone of engagement the now or the present. I could refer to it as The Now and perhaps win an honorable mention in the next Eckhart Tolle book or a few minutes on Oprah, but I'm feeling sober this morning, so I'll just stick with the now. Complexity is the activity that emerges between the juxtaposition of the hot, open-ended potential of the future and the cold, fixed certainty of the past. Complexity is the result of the tension between hot and cold, or to borrow a phrase from David Foster Wallace, it is the result of the miscegenation between a hot air mass and a cold air mass. That image works for me: we exist in the thunderstorm of the now, and though we may long for the potential of the future or the certainty of the past, we cannot live in either place. Life, and by extension knowledge, cannot exist in the chaotic order of the future or the fixed order of the past, but only in the dynamic, emerging order of the now as the heat of the future slides by and is transformed into the cold of the past (I'm perfectly willing to believe that the transition from hot activity to cold fixity only gives us the illusion of movement, but the visual metaphor is appealing to me). The complexity of the now is all we get, all we have, but because the now is a complex system, it is profoundly affected by and interacts with both the future and the past. Both the future and the past inform the now, and the dynamism of the now informs both the future and past in turn.

So for me, complexity is about as big an idea as I can have—sort of a God idea, but I don't intend to talk about God in this post; rather, I want to talk about knowledge and education and what the overarching concept of complexity has to do with them. How does it inform my ideas of knowledge and education? That's the question.

In their Introduction: Complexity and Knowledge (Futures, 2005, Vol. 37, pp. 581-584), Peter Allen and Paul Torrens note that the study of open systems proved to be very problematic for scientific knowledge in both the hard and soft sciences. They say:

For isolated and closed systems classical thermodynamics gave us the knowledge to predict the transformations and final equilibrium states of a system. Obviously, for frictionless systems such as those involved in planetary motion, Newton’s Laws allowed the prediction of orbits and eclipses, both forwards and backwards in time. Knowledge was complete and related directly to prediction. But, open systems were much more problematic. (581-582)

Closed systems, it seems, function in the simple and complicated domains, as defined in the Cynefin Framework. The simple and complicated domains afford us "the knowledge to predict the transformations and final equilibrium states of a system … both forwards and backwards in time." In closed systems, we can arrive at complete knowledge with reliable—testable and verifiable—predictions. Open systems do not allow such affordances.

This is a big problem, as Allen and Torrens note. So what's wrong with open, complex systems? First, we have a boundary issue. Open systems do not have discrete boundaries. I can see this quite clearly when I try to imagine the boundary between now and the future. The boundary has a thickness. I can feel the future coming and the past slipping, sometimes quite strongly, but I can never quite put my finger on the exact line between the future and now, and as soon as I fix my finger to a line, it slips into the past (the line, not my finger, which fortunately stays with me in the now). So the boundary also has an incredible thinness. So which is it—thick or thin? Well, both, of course. The boundary is open, and the exchanges between the system inside (now, for instance) and the systems outside (future and past, for instance) modify all systems. I really am speaking universally here; thus, I include those systems within the simple and complicated domains. From my point of view, everything belongs to the complex domain, and the simple and complicated are but temporary arrangements that we form for our convenience—like a sock drawer, or a classroom. We can pretend for a moment that our classrooms belong to the simple or complicated domains, but they don't. The classroom is a complex system of complex systems, and to treat them otherwise is to risk complete misunderstanding.

The dynamic interaction at the boundaries among complex, open systems means that it is very difficult to limit ourselves to local causality. In other words, the events in any one classroom are the result of remote causes (familial, social, economic, political, etc.) just as much, sometimes more so, as local causes (say, a classroom lecture or demonstration), and we are unlikely to be able to assess exactly what caused any given behavior in our students. Nor can we predict reliably the effects of any applied intervention or instructional design. As Allen and Torrens put it:

The simplest definition of a complex system is one that can respond in more than one way to its environment. … So, ‘knowledge’ about the future trajectory of the system can be both quantitatively and qualitatively wrong. … Innovation can occur, and it may have untold implications for the future evolution of both the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ the system. Similarly, the same ‘intervention’ may produce two different results on what were believed to be similar systems, since a single complex system can respond to an intervention in different possible ways. The outcomes could differ qualitatively and this surely must therefore introduce some doubt into the ethical basis for the intervention. … These new ideas force us to accept a significant reduction in our powers of prediction, and even in our ability to frame a useful question.

I find myself, here, slipping into considerations about evaluation and assessment in education, and I'm reminded of the recent words by Christina Hendricks, Stephen Downes, and Keith Brennan about how to assess a MOOC. I won't go into the details of their discussion, but I will say that from my vantage point measuring a MOOC, or any other classroom, is more like measuring a thunderstorm than measuring an automobile. That being said, I think we are beginning to develop some useful metrics for measuring open, complex systems. I may need to complete one of Siemens' learning analytics MOOCs to learn what some of those metrics.

I want to add, as well, that I think we literary scholars have been confronting open, complex systems for a long time. Consider a Shakespearian sonnet—Sonnet 73 will do. Almost all the data that I can gather from traditional measurement (meter, rhyme, number of lines, number of feet, etc.) says so very little about the poem. That data can enrich my understanding and appreciation of the poem, but by itself, that data reduces the poem to a closed system, a handy sock drawer, some trivia to answer on a test, and I would never read the poem again if that's all I had. Only when I open the poem to its environment, allow it to breathe, allow it to help me make connections to grandma, winter freezes, and dying embers, to my hopes and fears, only then do I find value and meaning. I find that value and meaning difficult to measure and assess, but I'm hopeful that we are developing the tools that will help us do so. Some very interesting things are happening in the digital humanities that point this way. I'll have to read some more.

cMOOCs & Temporary, Emergent Boundaries

In my last post, I quoted Marion Brady's observations about the transdisciplinary nature of thought and learning, what he calls Theory R: "Theory R requires students to make connections, to perceive relationships, and to synthesize ideas. It sends students searching the far corners of their minds without regard for the artificial, arbitrary boundaries imposed by academic disciplines." I think I understand Brady's point about and his disdain for the "artificial, arbitrary boundaries imposed by academic disciplines." I am entranced with transdisciplinarity and agree with the need to transcend boundaries that are too often impediments to learning and research, but I think Brady overstates the case, ignoring the necessity of boundaries for knowledge and action.

I recently came across Kurt A. Richardson's 2001 article On the Status of Natural Boundaries: A Complex Systems Perspective which helps me clarify my thinking on this issue. Richardson uses complexity theory to guide him through the dilemma of reductionism on one hand, in which boundaries are clear, discrete, and persistent, and holism on the other hand, in which boundaries disappear altogether as everything merges into the Universe or God.

Richardson begins by making a very useful distinction between complex and complicated systems. He states that he is concerned with complex systems, which he defines neatly:

A complex system is comprised of a large number of non-linearly interacting non-decomposable elements. The interactivity must be such that the system cannot be reducible to two or more distinct systems, and must be sufficient (where the determination of sufficient is problematic) to allow the system to display the behaviours characteristic of such systems. (p. 230)

He then clarifies the difference between these complex systems and the often similar looking complicated systems:

The principle difference between a complicated system and a complex system is not the presence of large numbers of entities and nonlinear interactions. The key difference is the nature of the overall connectivity, particularly the existence of feedback mechanisms. Despite the existence [of] nonlinearity complicated systems do not self-organise into new structures. They do not display a wide range of qualitatively different behaviours. The extent and nature of the nonlinear interactivity is what differentiates between a complicated and complex system. The division between these two categories at a compositional level is very blurred however. It is problematic to know from compositional information whether a system is complicated or complex without having information about its behaviour. Complicated and complex systems, then, can only safely be differentiated from each other by observing their respective behaviours.

A complicated system, then, is like a modern jet fighter: large numbers of entities with a myriad of interactions, including some nonlinear interactions, among its parts; however, the jet fighter is incapable of evolving, or self-organizing into new structures.

This distinction between complicated and complex systems helps me to understand the traditional classroom and the value of cMOOCs. A traditional school is a complicated system composed of large numbers of entities and interactions. Some classes are complicated systems, say those with students exceeding Dunbar's Number, but most are simple systems composed of a fixed number of entities (1 teacher and 25 students) and a few, mostly linear interactions: curriculum + instruction —> student learning. In such simple/complicated systems, boundaries are fixed, clear, and enforced. The subsystems (teacher, students, curriculum, lessons, texts, etc) are rigidly differentiated and the interactions among them are stable, predictable, and enforceable. The boundaries are in place and real, and any blurring of a boundary is considered a failure by purists or as a daring experiment in free learning by rebels. Either way, the reality of the boundary is reinforced. Violating a boundary confirms the boundary just as much as enforcing the boundary.

cMOOCs, unlike traditional classrooms and xMOOCs, are intentionally complex systems. cMOOCs and xMOOCs are differentiated by their respective behaviors. Like xMOOCs and some traditional classes, cMOOCs have large numbers of entities with a myriad of interactions, but unlike those complicated systems, cMOOCs can and do self-organize into different and new structures. They evolve through nonlinear interactions, feedback loops, non-local causalities, dialogic tensions, and a range of other behaviors characteristic of complex systems, and new structures of people and ideas emerge that could not have been anticipated by the designers of the MOOC. These complex interactions unfold across blog posts, tweets, Youtube videos, Flickr posts, and coffee cups, and new patterns of people and ideas emerge out of the interactions. Boundaries in cMOOCs, as in other complex systems, are different than the boundaries in simple and complicated systems.

Complex systems, then, are difficult to evaluate. Simple/complicated systems, with their fixed entities and interactions, have a strict linear progression which leads to a predictable, and usually measurable, outcome (if a teacher does A + B + C, then the student must learn D, which we can measure on a test and repeat A + B + C until the student learns D). However, as Richardson points out, complex systems "display many possible qualitatively different behavioural regimes (the nature and variety of which evolve), as well as exhibiting emergence, i.e. the emergence of macroscopic system structures and behaviours that are not at all obvious from their microscopic make-up … The order parameters that best describe the current behaviour of a complex system are not fixed, they evolve qualitatively as well as quantitatively." Factor in the butterfly effect (systemic sensitivity to initial conditions), and it's easy to see how difficult it becomes to predict the outcomes of any given cMOOC. This inability to predict outcomes changes the nature of evaluation. If we do not have a fixed, predictable outcome, then how do we measure the efficacy of the instruction?

Well, I seem to be slipping away from my original point about boundaries, but only a bit. A fixed, predictable outcome is a kind of boundary. It is an endpoint, a destination. In a traditional class or xMOOC, that boundary is discrete. A cMOOC does not have an endpoint or destination. Rather, it is more like another complex system, thunderstorms. Like thunderstorms, cMOOCs build in intensity, form their new structures (not random, but not totally predictable either), expend their energy, and subside, though they can continue to echo long after the thunder has stopped. So here's Richardson's main point about the distinction between complicated and complex systems: "the boundaries describing subsystems in a complicated system are prescribed and fixed whereas the boundaries delimiting subsystems in a complex system are emergent and temporary."

Anyone who has been in a cMOOC can see this fluidity of boundary, for instance, in deciding who is a student in the MOOC and who isn't. If you define student as someone who is actively participating in the MOOC, then that shifts wildly from week to week as people engage, disengage, get distracted, re-engage. And who's the teacher? That can be slippery as well. You can easily measure and quantify enrollment in a traditional class. Measuring a cMOOC is more like measuring a thunderstorm. Just when is a cloud part of the thunderstorm, and when isn't it? That can be hard to quantify or even qualify. The boundary keeps shifting as the thunderstorm, or cMOOC, evolves in its phase space. Come to think of it, developing procedures for defining the phase space of a cMOOC might be a fine start to evaluating them, but it's beyond my abilities.

So what does Richardson say about boundaries in complex systems? In short: "The only real absolute boundaries in a complex system are those that define the basic constituents and their interrelationships. All other boundaries are emergent and temporary. In order to relate these arguments to the real world it is assumed in addition that the universe is a complex system, i.e. the one and only well-defined system." He's having his cake and eating it, too, which is entirely permissible. The only complex system with absolute boundaries is the Universe itself. All other boundaries—in other words, everything else that we know about, including superstrings—are emergent and temporary. Now, curiously enough, this includes both traditional classrooms and xMOOCs as well as cMOOCs; the difference is that cMOOCs recognize and encourage emergent and temporary boundaries and structures, while xMOOCs and traditional classrooms pretend that their boundaries and structures are permanent and in some way blessed or sanctioned.

Okay, then, let's assume for the sake of argument that boundaries really are emergent and temporary. Does that mean that anything goes, that we can create boundaries where we wish as we wish, as the constructivists would have?

Richardson says no. He insists that we do not need to resort either to a constructivism that insists that "all boundaries are created in our minds and as such do not correlate with objective reality at all" or to a naive realism that insists that our ideas "perfectly map to their espoused objects." We can map reality, and those maps are based on the interactions of two complex systems, which implies a complex interaction: natural reality and conceptual reality. As Richardson says of the relationship between the natural and conceptual:

Rather than having a fixed relationship with natural boundaries, or having no relationship at all, conceptual boundaries do have a complex and changing relationship to reality. Sometimes this link might be so tenuous as to be unusable. Sometimes this link is so strong as to give us the impression that we might actually have absolute Truth to hand.

As Richardson says, "In the field of complexity there is evidence that, though there may be no real boundaries, there are resilient and relatively stable emergent structures." Mapping the world, then in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari's cartography, is problematic, but it is not impossible. Boundaries both conceptual and natural make that mapping possible, even necessary. They also make it temporary and emergent.

MOOCs, Transdisciplinarity, and Thinking Big

In his 2004 Phi Beta Kappan essay entitled Thinking Big: A Conceptual Framework for the Study of Everything, self-described contrarian educator Marion Brady writes that "the main task of educating is to help students make more sense of the world, themselves, and others" (p. 277). He attacks the current state of knowledge as represented in the plethora of academic subjects and disciplines and insists that such a fragmented approach to knowledge will, in the words of Buckminster Fuller, "be the undoing of the society." He quotes Fuller again in a marvelous 1980s complaint to American educators: "What you fellows in the universities do is make all the bright students into experts in something. That has some usefulness, but the trouble is it leaves the ones with mediocre minds and the dunderheads to become generalists who must serve as college presidents . . . and presidents of the United States." I truly wish I had said that, but … well, he was Buckminster Fuller.

Brady then identifies the basic theory of education that underlies the fragmented, disciplinary approach to knowledge:

The present curriculum, made up as it is of separate, specialized studies, exerts considerable pressure on teachers to make major use of what could be called “Theory T.” Theory T dominates American education. … T stands for “transfer.” Those who accept Theory T believe that knowledge is located in teachers’ heads, textbooks, reference materials, and on the Internet and that the instructional challenge is to transfer it from these locations into the empty space in students’ heads. The degree of success of the transfer process can be measured with relative ease, which helps explain its broad appeal. … Evaluating performance is simple enough to allow student responses to be scored by a machine. (pp. 279, 280)

 He then contrasts Theory T with what he calls Theory R:

Theory R assumes not that students’ heads are empty but that they are full. The primary instructional challenge, then, is not to transfer new knowledge but to help students reorganize existing knowledge to make it more useful, consistent, or true and to supplement it with insights and skills that will help explain more fully what they already know.… Students in Theory R classrooms must be active processors of information. Theory T emphasizes recall; Theory R requires students to engage in every known thought process. … Theory R requires students to make connections, to perceive relationships, and to synthesize ideas. It sends students searching the far corners of their minds without regard for the artificial, arbitrary boundaries imposed by academic disciplines.

Brady gives here a neat precursor to Connectivism, I think. First, he emphasizes that each student already possesses all the neuronal networks needed for making connections, perceiving relationships, and synthesizing ideas. We teachers do not transfer anything into the imagined empty memory slots of student brains; rather, we present them with a, hopefully, coherent and engaging series of artifacts and experiences to which they may connect, perceive relationships, and synthesize ideas, or not. All too often what they connect to, perceive relationships among, and synthesize are ideas that we never taught, or didn't know we were teaching. And each student makes these connections and patterns within an ecosystem (their own life stories) that we teachers know little to nothing about, and that ecosystem, that context, provides almost all of the meaning for whatever new connections and patterns the student is weaving. This reminds me much of Paul Cilliers' definition of knowledge as "information that is situated historically and contextually by a knowing subject" (Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely in Capra, Juarrero, Sotolongo, and van Uden's Reframing Complexity: Perspectives from North and South, 2007, p. 85). In other words, while information may exist apart from our students as data, it does not become knowledge until the student situates that information within a context that includes themselves and that necessarily informs the information in ways we teachers cannot predict or control.

But what most impressed me about Brady's article was his observation that this process of making connections (mapping, as Deleuze and Guattari say) "sends students searching the far corners of their minds without regard for the artificial, arbitrary boundaries imposed by academic disciplines." It seems to me that Connectivism and MOOCs are wonderful vehicles for transdisciplinarity, which transcends the "boundaries imposed by academic disciplines." I know that the MOOCs I have joined have had a marvelous, transdisciplinary reach in content and participants. Though I have had some of the most engaging and rewarding conversations of my professional life, as far as I know, I have actually had no conversation with another writing teacher, aside from one colleague who shared an office with me and a few MOOCs. Almost all of my conversations have been with scholars and practitioners outside my discipline, which makes my engagement in the MOOCs most transdisciplinary.

I think I will explore this a bit more in the next few posts.

MOOCs and One-on-One Teaching

Ahh … home!

I've been away too long writing something else, and I missed my warm, comfortable blog. Fortunately, The Chronicle of Higher Education just published an article by Steve Kolowich entitled MOOC Students Who Got Offline Help Scored Higher, Study Finds (June 7, 2013, 4:55 am) that rattles me a bit, and as I have a spare hour waiting to tutor students who will not likely show this early on a Friday morning, I'll jot down a response.

Mr. Kolowich starts his article by saying:

One of the first things researchers have learned about student success in massive open online courses is that in-person, one-on-one teaching still matters. 

For online learners who took the first session of “Circuits & Electronics,” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s hallmark MOOC, those who worked on course material offline with a classmate or “someone who teaches or has expertise” in the subject did better than those who did not, according to a new paper by researchers at MIT and Harvard University.

The assumptions in this lede annoy me, and it injures the conversation about MOOCs. First, the statement one-on-one teaching still matters is an ugly little straw man. Who ever said that one-on-one teaching does not matter? I've been listening to hard core connectivists and MOOC providers Siemens, Downes, and Cormier for about four years now, and never once have they suggested that one-on-one teaching does not matter.

Then, use of the word teaching is misleading, especially if most of Mr. Kolowich's readers still associate teaching with teacher-centric lectures, demonstrations, and discussions. This is not the kind of teaching that the report finds evidence for; rather, the report writers say:

On average, with all other predictors being equal, a student who worked offline with someone else in the class or someone who had expertise in the subject would have a predicted score almost three points higher than someone working by him or herself.

Let's unpack this. First, connecting with someone else in the class or someone who had expertise in the subject sounds much more like self-forming, self-organizing study groups or tutorial groups than a traditional classroom. In every MOOC I have taken, these kinds of self-forming networks have been as much a part, perhaps more, of the education I received than the formal presentations. And these connections are very one-on-one. I recall wonderful blog conversations in PLENK2010 with Dave Cormier, LeRoy Hill, and Rita Kop, and more recent blog conversations in ETMOOC with Christina Hendricks and Keith Brennan. Or long walks and conversations with my office mates and colleagues Tom Clancy and Bruce Neubauer as we tried to digest those early MOOCs we attended together. See? Real people with real names. This kind of connectivity is the heart of MOOCs, and this seems to be the kind of teaching that the MIT report uncovers. Well, I'm glad they saw it—it's been there all along.

Then note that the authors report average scores almost three points higher than someone working by him or herself. Is this statistically significant? Perhaps, but just barely, I think. A not quite three points average increase is hardly a ringing endorsement for any kind of instructional strategy. Frankly, I'm surprised that they didn't find a greater difference.

Finally, I'm annoyed because I suspect that the focus of the article and the report is on xMOOCs rather than cMOOCs. Perhaps the pedagogical theories behind xMOOCs do suggest that one-on-one teaching is not important, but the practice behind xMOOCs shows otherwise. The complex connectivity at the heart of MOOCs will come out, like the rhizome that it is, but it won't look much like the traditional classroom, so let's not pander to that myth.

Quantum Random Walks and MOOCs

If Reality is an emergent property of the zone of engagement between the Knower and the Real, then what does that say about education in general and educational practices such as MOOCs in particular?

I think I should draw out some of the implications of this arrangement: a zone of engagement between the Knower and the Real. Most of the Real is hidden from us, both because it is beyond the horizons of possible engagement and because there is more Real than we can engage even within those horizons. Still, there is plenty of Real that we can know (we won't run out), and we are ever extending our horizons through technologies that allow us to engage more and more. So there's lots to learn, even if we can never learn it all. That's extremely good news, I think. A fine gospel for educators. Our vocations, if not our jobs, are secure.

That's our status in terms of the Real, but what about Reality, or the stuff that we can engage and can know, the stuff that "resists our experiences, representations, descriptions, images, or mathematical formulations" (Manifesto, 20)? Do we know all of that? This seems to me a tricky question. The first glib answer is that, of course, we don't know all of Reality, but I immediately want to counter that while I or you alone don't know all of Reality, maybe we do. Is it useful to define Reality as the sum total of what humans know and have known? I think so, and I think it points us to a most useful feature of MOOCs.

It seems to me that MOOCs, especially of the Connectivist variety, help us to approach the question of what we know rather than what I know. This is an important question because it undermines traditional education and its strict grading economy: 1 student = 1 grade, no cheating.

As electronically networked entities, MOOCs function similarly to quantum walks, a concept I first heard about in MIT quantum computing engineer Seth Lloyd's talk on Quantum Life, or how organisms have evolved to make use of quantum effects. At one point (11:50), Lloyd asks how photosynthesis can be so efficient (about 99%) when a photon that strikes a leaf must go through a maze of molecules to find the central photosynthesis processing unit. Apparently the photon engages in some very special kind of quantum multi-tasking, or quantum superposition, called a quantum algorithm. I don't have the science and mathematical knowledge to go into the details, and as Lloyd notes himself, even quantum scientists find superposition counter-intuitive, but basically the photon is able to explore all pathways at once, quickly locating the correct path to bliss.

For me, a better, more manageable, image of quantum walks is how bees search for a new hive. The bees start from the hive and then search all paths (approximately) at once, bringing back reports about each path, which is subsequently processed by the hive. This is what MOOCs can do, and this is what makes them so powerful, at least for me. Like bees searching for a new hive, MOOCers can begin in the middle with a given curriculum, but then they fan outward making a thousand different connections at once before bringing that new information back to the MOOC. Rather than exploring the single path of a single instructor, a functioning Connectivist MOOC explores nearly all paths at once, making connections to more knowledge, more contexts, than any single instructor, even a really bright and gifted instructor, can make. In other words, like bees in a hive, MOOCs use a process something like a quantum random walk to search all paths (approximately) at once, aggregate that knowledge with something like GRSShopper, and thereby create actionable knowledge available to the entire MOOC.

I like this image. For me, it captures some of the best of what happens within a successful Connectivist MOOC. This is good stuff.

MOOCs and Network Scale

I've just listened to a TVO lecture by Eric Mazur, a well known physicist at Harvard University, in which he talks about the stop-motion photography that his lab is able to perform. While I like the magic  of stop-motion photography as much as any, what really impressed me was his clarification of the remoteness of different space/time scales from our own. Different network scales lead to radically different views of reality—in the words of Nicolescu, they lead to different levels of reality.

First, Mazur helped me to see how intimately space and time are bound together. When we speed up or slow down time significantly, then we are automatically reducing or expanding the amount of space that we are encompassing. I know, of course, from my readings in science that since Einstein we have known that space and time are a unit and that if, for instance, you bend space then you bend time, but for whatever reason, Mazur helped me see that more clearly. When you talk about nanoseconds, then you are also talking about micro-distances. The one includes the other.

But mostly Mazur helped me understand viscerally the truly profound differences between different scales, or levels, of reality. Basically, with our natural eye we see very little of life that happens at scales much smaller/faster or larger/slower than our own. For us, anything quicker than the blink of an eye or smaller than a grain of sand simply doesn't exist. Likewise, anything slower than a lifetime or larger than the horizon doesn't exist.

Except, of course, that it does exist, and it influences us. Those influences exert themselves across the various scales, or levels, of reality, affecting us almost as if by magic. Thus, the Moon, on a scale far larger than our own, exerts influences on the molecules of our bodies, a scale far smaller than our own, and drives us crazy once a month, as any grade school teacher can tell you.

Our technology, including Mazur's own amazing lazer-aided photography, allows us to slow down time, to almost stop it, so that we can see events that have been happening all along and affecting us in mysterious ways, but that we could not see. Likewise, with our telescopes we can speed up time almost back to the Big Bang to learn what's been happening in those long processes of the Cosmos.

This makes me wonder, then, about the effects of scale within a MOOC. It seems to me that just saying MOOCs are massive does not quite get the point of all those people in a coherent group. I have a sense that shifting from a normal 20 or even 200-student class to a 2,000 or 20,000-student MOOC is something else entirely. As Nicolescu says of the different levels of reality: "two levels of Reality are different if, while passing from one to the other, there is a break in the laws and a break in the fundamental concepts" (Manifesto, 21). Education among 2,000 may be a radically different scale of education than educating 20 or 200. As Mazur shows, when we use factors of 10 down from a second, we quickly reach scales that are not obvious to the naked eye and that behave very differently than our ordinary scale. Likewise, longer/larger scales are also not obvious to the naked eye and behave very differently. It seems to me quite reasonable that MOOCs are fundamentally different than a 20-student classroom. That is not a radical statement, but I don't think that xMOOCs are aware of it. They appear to be committed to business as usual: transferring some knowledge or skill from a teacher to a student, 20-at-a-time or 20,000-at-a-time. I think they are making a fundamental mistake.

But I don't really know how. Well, I've identified yet another thing that I don't know. I don't understand well enough the different structures and interactions at the different scales of education and I don't know how those different scales influence one another across the various scales. If anyone has already addressed this issue, then please direct me to them if you can. Thanks.

Socks, Complexity, and the Included Middle in MOOCs

In Chapter 5 of his book Manifesto of Transdisciplinary, Nicolescu says that the logic of the excluded middle applies mostly to simple situations while the logic of the included middle applies to complexity and complex situations. I think that Nicolescu's observation has implications for the Cynefin framework and for MOOCs. I'll explore these implications by defining simplicity, complexity, and the included middle in ways conducive to my argument.

Let's start with simplicity and complexity within the Cynefin framework of Dave Snowden. Wikipedia says that:

The Cynefin framework has five domains. The first four domains are:

1. Simple, in which the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all, the approach is to Sense - Categorise - Respond and we can apply best practice. 
2. Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense - Analyze - Respond and we can apply good practice. 
3. Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe - Sense - Respond and we can sense emergent practice. 
4. Chaotic, in which there is no relationship between cause and effect at systems level, the approach is to Act - Sense - Respond and we can discover novel practice. 

The fifth domain is Disorder, which is the state of not knowing what type of causality exists, in which state people will revert to their own comfort zone in making a decision.

I use a sock drawer explanation of the Cynefin framework. A simple sock drawer is a closed system of clean, homogenously coupled socks arranged neatly in a highly specific order: dress socks on the left and casual/sport socks on the right. Each of those categories is then sorted by colors (left to right: dress > black, grey, blue, brown, green and casual/sport > white, black, team colors. Everyone can readily see the relationships here and intuitively knows that this is the best arrangement for socks, and if I can maintain this order, then the task of choosing socks is simple, even on a dark morning (if you detect a tinge of sarcasm, then you have a sense of my opinion of the simple domain).

A complicated sock drawer is also a closed system of clean, homogenously coupled socks arranged in matched pairs by color and use, but also by fabric types, without labels. This drawer domain demands analysis and expertise, and often requires my wife's input as I cannot reliably distinguish cotton from rayon from blends. A complicated drawer messes up my wife's morning.

A complex sock drawer is an open system of clean, heterogenously coupled socks, including one or more unidentified men's socks that are not my size or style. Such a sock drawer suggests connections to and interactions with emerging practices beyond the strict confines of the drawer, the closed system. Choosing socks from this drawer requires an aesthetic sensibility and prayer, and it messes up my whole day.

A chaotic sock drawer is an open system of uncoupled socks—some clean, some not—men's and women's underwear, credit card receipts, spare change, and electronic gear, all in no discernable order. Both its contents and its interactions with the ecosystem are totally unpredictable. I have no way to choose a pair of clean socks, and this drawer messes up my whole professional and personal life and challenges my sense of myself and my wife.

It seems to me that much of human activity, both work and play, is an effort to move Life from the chaotic/complex domains into the simple/complicated domains (though I think lawyers work hard to move Life from the simple to the complicated domain, but that's another post). We can see why. A simple sock drawer reduces the aggravation in our lives and renders simple and mindless a task that most of us do not want to spend much energy on. Almost all factory processes depend on rendering complicated or complex tasks into the simple domain so that even an idiot can perform them. Indeed too much intelligence, curiosity, or humor is usually an impediment to good factory processes.

For the rest of this discussion and for the ease of reference, I will conflate the closed simple and complicated domains into the simple and the open complex and chaotic domains into the complex. A person's relationship with the simple domain goes far, for me, toward explaining that person's orientation toward life. A fundamentalist, for instance, will insist that the order of their sock drawer is ordained by the gods or the founding fathers and must be unerringly maintained at the risk of eternal damnation and ruin. A conservative will insist that they've always arranged their sock drawers this way, they see no reason to change it now, and they won't change it unless everyone else changes and proves that the new order is substantially better. A progressive will grow tired of the old arrangement and will try new arrangements to see if they work better, even if they don't. Free spirits will keep no particular order of socks. Perverse people will create an orderly sock drawer and then violate it. Kind people will organize your sock drawer for you. A holy person will organize your sock drawer in the way you want. A mean person will mess up your sock drawer. A tyrant will force everyone to keep their socks in the same order. In the U.S., Democrats will say you can buy only organically grown, fair trade socks, but you may pair them as you like. Republicans will say you can buy any socks you like, but you must pair them in prescribed ways.

You get the idea. It seems to me that, likewise, much of education is an attempt to move knowledge from the open, complex domain to the closed, simple domain, and it's easy to see why this is so. Only knowledge in the simple domain can be easily packaged for easy transfer from teacher/expert to student. (AN UNCOMFORTABLE ASIDE: I'm always amazed by the otherwise liberal faculty who become fundamentalists and fascists about the contents and arrangements of their own disciplines, their own little sock drawer. They will go to war over who belongs in the canon of World Literature or whether or not Pluto is a planet).

The problem with the simple domain for me is that almost all of Life belongs to the complex domain, and it requires much energy to force any aspect of Life into the simple. It requires even more energy to keep a chunk of Life in the simple domain. To add a second metaphor, think of a highway as a process of wrenching a strip of complex terrain into the simple domain for human use. The highway forces the complex texture of the land into a regular, flat, smooth surface. The highway absolutely remembers the pathway to a destination. It has a specific starting point and ending point. It has regular, reliable signs. Cars pass each other safely at 60 miles an hour because they stay on their own sides and follow the simple, explicit rules. This is a pre-eminently useful and beneficial use of the simple domain, and no one would sensibly argue for complex highway systems. Still, though a few highways have endured thousands of years, though seldom in their totality and never without some kind of maintenance, most highways will revert to the complex domain within a few years or decades after they are abandoned by humans. Complexity always wins out over the simple domain. Simple is hard to achieve, and I don't think it is ever completely stable. If it were, then we would all be fascists and fundamentalists. Nothing else would make sense.

Knowledge has an even shorter shelf-life than roads do, especially these days. Yesterday's knowledge is no longer a smooth road to effective and appropriate action in the world. Today, we must constantly map and re-map what we know about the world and how to behave in it. It isn't easy being a fundamentalist these days. You have to ignore so much, become so blind, to maintain the internal consistency of your beliefs and your logic. You have to ignore so much evidence to continue to believe that the Sun rises and circles the Earth each day. Mind you: there is some evidence for just that point of view (go out some morning, and watch the Sun rise), but the evidence for the Earth circling the Sun is overwhelming, if you will shift your point of view and look. Fundamentalists refuse to do that.

And this brings me to Lupasco and Nicolescu's logic of the included middle. Basically, this law is a response to the reality revealed by quantum physics which regularly ignores Aristotle's laws of classical logic:

1. Law of Identity: A is A.
2. Law of Non-Contradiction: A is not non-A.
3. Law of Excluded Middle: There is no middle ground that is both A and non-A.

For millennia, this logic seemed as eternal and as right as the universe until we learned that light, for instance, can be both a particle and a wave at the same time. It was like learning that the Sun does not circle the Earth and having to change all our ways of thinking and knowing. Lupasco's Law of the Included Middle says that there is a middle ground that is both A and non-A, and as Nicolescu insists, Lupasco demonstrated that this logic was rigorous, internally consistent, and empirically verifiable. Nicolescu added to this Law of the Included Middle ideas about the different levels of Reality and Perception, and all of a sudden we gained a reliable way of knowing the world that maps to things we had divined and intuited earlier, but couldn't quite say. As Nicolescu points out in his Manifesto, a simple road follows classical logic: it has two sides (A and non-A, left and right) and there is no middle ground that is both A and non-A. We know which side is ours, and we violate the distinction between left and right at our peril and the peril of others. But this clear distinction between left and right holds only at the flat, untextured level of everyday traffic, and if we shift our point of view outward to the cosmic level or inward to the atomic level, then we readily see that the contradictions disappear. There is a middle ground where left is right and right is left. Or perhaps it's better to say that from a different level of Reality, left and right no longer make sense and cease to be a contradiction.

We've always intuitively known that a shift in point of view to a new level could obviate contradictions at another level—that's what therapy, conversions, and paradigm shifts are all about—but fundamentalists (political and scientific as well as religious) have always tried to flatten Reality into a single, simple domain like road kill on a highway. If you can never transcend the flat surface of the highway, then left is always left, right is always right, and there is no middle ground, no fifty shades of gray. But if you accept that Reality is complex, with different textures, different laws, different logics working across different levels and scales, then you can see the Included Middle. You see that right is right and left is wrong works only at a certain level and in a narrow place and time. The logic and utility of that simple level can be most valuable, but we should not allow that value and utility to trap us at that level. To return to my sock drawer analogy, the order in my drawer is very useful to me, but I should not be trapped by that utility. No drawer is sufficiently large to accommodate and account for all socks, and if it were, it wouldn't be useful to me. To extend this to education, I should not present my sock drawer (or my view of British Romanticism or physics or whatever) as the only way to do socks.

And this brings me at long last to MOOCs and their connection to Cynefin and the Included Middle. The traditional class built around a single teacher/expert almost of necessity encourages a single, simple view of Reality (British Romanticism or physics, for instance). Even if the enlightened teacher works against this tendency, students will tend to venerate the teaching and preaching and flatten other expert opinions into simple contradictions to be ignored or discounted. This is so especially if the teacher is a great person. In the early 1980s, I had the great fortune to study under Nobel prize winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, and though he was himself an incredibly rich and complex artist with a complex view of Reality, his voice was so strong and convincing that we students took his sayings as gospel. For a while, all literature for me was Singerian, and I inhabited a delightful, but simple domain. I don't regret the experience at all, but even a mind as rich, intricate, and complex as Singer's is not sufficient to account for all of reality, not even the literary reality. We have all had other, lesser teachers who were tyrants in one way or another, both benevolent and not, intent upon forcing a simple view of biology or business on their students.

A connectivist MOOC, on the other hand, provides an ideal platform for a complex exploration of the Included Middle. Even if a given MOOC starts with a specific content, agenda, and exposition by facilitators, its open nature mandates that participants rip, mix, and burn, or in the more accurate words of Dave Cormier:

1. orient,
2. declare,
3. network,
4. cluster, and
5. focus.

MOOCs are one of the best platforms that I know of for moving education from the simple domain to the complex domain, a place that I find much more engaging and rewarding. This is not to say that all MOOCs embrace the complex, as many xMOOCs have demonstrated. Still, I am convinced that connectivist MOOCs will persist and will show all of us how, in the long run, complex education takes us farther than simple education. More and more of simple education (the multiplication tables, for instance) is being moved to our machines, and I do not see this trend changing, regardless of our personal views about it. Machines are teaching the simple and they are even removing the need for learning the simple (I really don't know that we will still be teaching children their multiplication tables 30 years from now). I think the complex domain is the future of education, especially higher education, and MOOCs are one of the most concrete steps toward that future.

The massive rhizome, #etmooc

To my mind, one of the most positive and encouraging aspects of connectivist MOOCs is the way they change the roles of teacher and student and, thus, the relationship between the two. cMOOCs embody what we mean when we glibly say that teachers should become the guide on the side, curators of information and knowledge, or guides to the context of information and not the content. There must be a number of reasons for this turn in cMOOCs, but two things impress me just now: transfer of information and local causality.

Traditional pedagogical practice has been grounded in the notion of education as a transfer of information: that a teacher, by transferring information, causes learning in students and that this is appropriate. I have argued against this teacher-centric, information-transfer concept of education in numerous other posts, agreeing with those such as Stephen Downes who insist that education is not a process of transferring information from the teacher's mind to the students' minds. There is no transfer of information, no nugget that leaves the teacher's mind to lodge itself in the students' minds. At best, speaking of a transfer of information from teacher to student is a fiction, a stubborn anachronism, a common and convenient manner of misspeaking similar to saying the sun rises, when we know that the Sun is not rising but the Earth is turning, as Deleuze and Guattari point out in A Thousand Plateaus (6). Downes gives a much more thorough explanation of why this concept of information transer is wrong, and you should follow the link above to read all about it.

However, my reading of Nicolescu's Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (2002) is revealing to me another problematic assumption underlying traditional education: local causality, which is closely related to the notion of information transfer, by the way. Traditionally, we assume that if a student learns something, then that learning must surely have been caused by someone or something in close proximity, most likely the teacher, but perhaps a book or even an online lesson. This is far too narrow a view of causality that excludes some of the best learning that takes place in a cMOOC.

Early in Manifesto, Nicolescu says that to comprehend the quantum world, we must expand our concept of reality to accommodate quantum weirdness. This means in part that we must expand our concept of causality beyond the merely local to the global. Nicolescu says it better:

Quantum non-separability casts no doubt on causality itself but only on one of its forms: local causality. It does not cast doubt on scientific objectivity, but only on one of its forms: classical objectivity, which is based on the belief that there can be no connection present other than the local. The existence of nonlocal correlations enlarges the field of truth, of Reality. Quantum non-separability tells us that in this world, at least at a certain level, there is a coherence, a unity of laws that insure the evolution of the totality of natural systems. (12)

I want to explore the notion that cMOOCs allow for the existence of nonlocal correlations that enlarge the field of education, but first, keep in mind that this is an exploration—I really don't know where this will go—and I am not denying local causality. Rather, I'm following Nicolescu's example and trying to expand the field of education.

One of the true instructional values of MOOCs lies in their enormous size, which provides an effect similar to that of the enormous number of neurons in the human brain. Our individual neurons share much in common with those of mice, so that the electro-chemical processes are quite similar. This means that the local causality in our brains is pretty much like the local causality in a mouse's brain: stimulus comes in, neuron fires, other neurons fire in response, and eventually the mouse or human makes some response to the stimulus. Local causality explains this rather complicated, but not complex, chain of events. This sequence is merely complicated because, given the time and equipment, we can trace the entire event from stimulus through to response, thus accounting for the response. And by the way, this complicated chain of events appears to explain much about how much of the world works, about why our leg jumps when a hammer strikes our knee or our mouth salivates when we see a cookie. We can quite reliably say that the hammer strike causes our leg to jump. However, these merely complicated chains of causes and effects do not appear sufficient to account for consciousness. They may be necessary, but they are not sufficient.

As I understand it, that humans have a different level of consciousness than mice arises, in part, from a critical number of neurons (I don't know the critical number, if there is just one) which allows for more complex interactions with the external world, more complex patterns and interactions within the internal processes and patterns, and for the evolution of the totality of [the] natural system. It seems to me, more neurons afford a greater pull from the system which enlarges the simple stimulus-response mechanism to a different, more complex level of reality: consciousness. When we have enough neurons working in sufficiently complex patterns, then consciousness emerges. It is pulled, or globally caused, by the overall system itself. Local causality (the push of neurons firing) is not sufficient to explain consciousness. We need a global cause (the pull of a global structure) to make consciousness work, to make it emerge.

Likewise, thousands of students working together can globally cause us learn in ways that a single teacher cannot locally cause.

I think we intuitively know this to be true, but our classical science is not geared to address it. Classical science, as Nicolescu says, relies almost totally on local causality. And as both Nicolescu and Morin have noted, classical science has been wildly successful for the past few centuries. It is a very difficult paradigm to challenge—just as the paradigms developed by Aristotle and Ptolemy were difficult to challenge. Eventually, though reality gets in the way, and as Nicolescu says, whatever our religious or philosophical convictions, we must "bow to experimental evidence and theoretical self-consistency" (16). Quantum mechanics demands more than local causality to account for the entities and events we now observe in our particle accelerators. Just as local causality is too narrow to account for the structures and properties of the Univers, it is too narrow to account for education. We need to incorporate global causality, and cMOOCs do just that, I think.

cMOOCs are not alone or even first in recognizing and utilizing global causality. Rousseau had problems with the mechanistic universe of Newton and Descartes, and then Jung had his notion of the collective unconscious, but if Nicolescu is correct, then quantum physics has made the expansion beyond local causality unavoidable. The concept of global causality seems to me to be everywhere. I recently listened to a Big Ideas lecture from psychologist Marc Fournier entitled Domination and Depression, in which Prof. Fournier demonstrated to my satisfaction that people will assume a role and place within a group that is a function of the group (global causality) rather than any given individual (local causality). When we like this kind of group causality, we call it a supportive community, and when we don't like it, we call it peer pressure. Either way, the cause of one's place in a community is a function of global causality rather than merely local causality.

Even more relevant, my ETMOOC friend Christina Hendricks has just posted about the effects of the pull (global causality) on an individual when they open themselves to a large community. She speaks of the effects on her own behavior, and she quotes David Wiley who describes some of the effects of making his own courses more open to a larger community:

• He required that all students’ written work must be made public on the course blog. One result of this was that Stephen Downes–a prominent Canadian researcher, blogger, cMOOC facilitator, and editor the popular newsletter OLDaily (online learning daily)–had read some of the work and highlighted a few posts, sending them out to thousands of his followers in the OLDaily newsletter. Wiley noted that the following week, much of the students’ writing got longer, better, and more thoughtful. Such improvement came much better this way than just encouraging students to write more carefully and address issues more deeply through the instructor’s comments.

• He wrote up a script for a fake sitcom (situation comedy) tv show, to show differing viewpoints on opening up “learning objects” (what are now called open educational resources, I think). He put this up on a course wiki, and some of the graduate students in the course started writing in new characters in order to give even more perspectives. They hadn’t asked or said they were going to do it, but just did. This was, he stated in the talk, a great way to get students involved in creating learning materials for the course itself.

The student writing became better not simply because of local causes from the teacher, but also because of global causes from the wider group (Stephen Downes in this case, who seems to be a general purpose, global cause of things). The graduate students expanded the sitcom with new characters, even though they were not locally caused to do so by the instructor. Rather, they were responding to the pull of the group, a global cause. I should note that Christina sees both a positive and negative side to this global influence: an entity within the group can be encouraged to excel creatively or it can be forced into conformity. I, however, am not sure that these opposing functions are problematic. I think our brains have both creative and conformative global tendencies, and it is the dialogical tension between these two contradictory impulses that makes the brain a functioning unity. I don't see these two different impulses as a problem, but as a source of the dynamism required for a useful and productive mind. It's the tension between conformity and creativity that makes a brain work, even though sometimes we all are too conformist or too creative and disruptive for a given situation.

cMOOCs are much more open to this global causality, and the people who like cMOOCs the most appear to be responding to this global causality. They like it. I like it. It is by far the most rewarding aspect of all the cMOOCs that I have taken.

I do not yet know enough about global causality and the logic of the included middle. Paul Ghils has suggested that I read Howard Kainz's Paradox, Dialectic and system.a Contemporary reconstruction of Hegelian problematic. I intend to do so, and maybe then, I will be more articulate and clear. In the meantime, I will continue playing in cMOOCs. I like the lunar pull of global causality.

Rewiring Student Brains

James Zull's book The Art of Changing the Brain contends that neuroscience can guide our teaching practice by revealing to us how our brains actually learn. I think his insight is reliable, and I'm particularly satisfied that he views the brain as a complex, multi-scale network and learning as changing, extending, and strengthening the connections within those networks. This fits quite nicely with connectivism, which defines learning in similar networking terms.

This definition of learning puts the student/learner at the center of the learning process, unlike traditional education, which puts the teacher/authority at the center of the learning process. Why? Because if learning is the development of new connections within existing neuronal networks, then learning depends overwhelmingly on the engagement of the student. No teacher can directly touch a student's brain. Development of neuronal networks absolutely depends on the student exercising her own brain, and her teachers cannot do it for her, any more than a fitness trainer can exercise her muscles for her. The student must sweat and exert herself and must want to sweat and exert. If the student is emotionally, physically, or intellectually incapable of learning a given lesson at a given time, then there is little the teacher can do. At best, teachers can create an environment that is engaging for a student and that encourages them to exert themselves, but the teacher cannot do it for them.

Then, each student comes with different neuronal networks. We teachers can often rely on rather gross similarities among student perceptions, neuronal processes, and responses, but the multi-cultural, inclusive nature of many modern classes shows how unreliable our dependence on these gross similarities can be. Our brilliant lectures and lessons, then, may engage one student and not the next. Neuroscience tells us why. If learning is a process of developing existing neuronal networks, then learning must start with each student's existing neuronal networks, and they ain't all the same. Some are positively alien, and ALL are different from the teacher's. Ground Zero for learning is NOT the teacher's knowledge, then, but her students' alien neuronal structures.

Traditional education views the teaching/learning process as a teacher writing a concept on the chalkboard of the student's mind. This is a radically false notion of education, and yet it is still the basis for too much instruction, even if the chalkboard is now a computer screen and the lecture involves a PowerPoint. The teacher's job is crucial but not essential to learning. The skillful teacher can create an environment that focuses, encourages, and enables students to stretch their minds to create new neuronal networks, but the teacher cannot create those neuronal networks for the student.

Moreover, the teacher cannot prevent students from learning. Most of the stuff that I remember learning in middle school—dealing mostly with sex—was never taught in the classroom. I suspect that most of what is learned in school is never taught from a lesson plan.

So what's the lesson for this teacher? First, I must start with the student and with their existing neuronal networks. That means that each program of study should begin not with what I know (the course content) but with what they know. I must build in to my classes time to discern what my students already know and do not know. The flipped classroom and just-in-time teaching techniques allow for this, and I use them.

Second, given the variety of neuronal structures I'm likely to encounter in any class, I must create a flexible environment that allows for a variety of engagements, processes, and responses. There is no one-size fits all. I know where I want my students to end-up, but I cannot assume one highway to travel or one vehicle. Some come from the cane fields near Belle Glade, some from the tenements of Lake Worth, and quite a few from Haiti, Jamaica, and Europe. Some take the bus, some walk, and some drive different cars. Some are here in a few minutes, some drive an hour or more each way. Getting everyone to West Palm Beach is a very messy business, and many teachers simply don't want to take that on. I think that's why they focus on simply delivering their content. It's much easier. It's also largely ineffective.

Third, I must monitor frequently, and not only to discern what they are not learning, but also what they are learning. I must check their progress along their different highways, monitoring where they are going and how fast they are travelling. If a particular lesson calls for a very specific destination, then I must be able to encourage those on-track to continue even if they can't see the destination, and I must be able to nudge those off-track to make new turn. If a particular lesson has no specific destination, as is the case with many cMOOCs, then I must delight in learning where they are going and encourage them to share their snapshots with me.

Thinking Like Grass

Like most everyone else for the past six months, I've been thinking about MOOCs (note that on Susan Bainbridge's current Connectivism Scoop page, easily half of the scooped articles are about MOOCs (2nd note: if you are at all interested in Connectivism and MOOCs, then you should follow Susan's Scoop. It's invaluable, and I deeply appreciate her work.)). I've introduced a good friend of mine to MOOCs and Connectivism, and he read the things I sent him. He was interested in the concept, but he had two immediate concerns about MOOCs:

• Social sharing can legitimize any kind of knowledge, like racism, sexism, imperialism. Without an ethical standard, knowledge is free to kill as well as to cure. (Which is not to say that traditional education is ethical—I don’t think it is. But there are other options.)
• And the second is the danger of elitism. I don’t see my students getting very far in their rhizomatic education. (Which is not to say that they will get very far in traditional education either.) I guess I would call this feature the “appearance of democratic education.”

He concluded by asking if I have read "Morris' News from Nowhere—a late 19th-century British utopian novel" in which the citizens "have no theory of education at all, and no specific practices either." I have not read the novel, but I will—after all, turnabout is fair play, but I want to respond to Dan's concerns.

First, I have not thought much about the ethical aspects of Connectivism and MOOCs, nor have I read much about ethics from anyone else in the connectivist discussion, but I think Connectivism and cMOOCs have an ethical perspective built into the first O in MOOC: Open. MOOCs are open in any number of ways, but especially in terms of network connectivity. Anyone is free to connect to and engage a MOOC, and they will do so IF they perceive value in the connection. No one has to connect, and in fact, most of the people who sign-up for a MOOC do not engage the MOOC in any degree that might be significant to an observer—say a college administrator looking for the ROI. This should not bee sting as a bad thing. Rather, it should be seen as bee efficiency. Apparently, when bees want to move their hive, the scout bees fan out in all directions. Most of them find nothing, but a few find something, and through their connections, they channel the other bees into these promising pathways until finally the way to a new hive emerges. What starts as chaos (MOOCers will be familiar with this sense of early chaos in a MOOC) turns out to be a highly efficient way to create new meaning for the hive. Still, it's highly wasteful, like most MOOCs. Fortunately, the cost of each connection to a MOOC is almost nil, so the waste is functionally irrelevant. But the waste identifies quite efficiently those students who are in some way ripe for learning whatever emerges from the MOOC. Those who are not ripe simply fade away with little to no damage to the MOOC. I like this bee efficiency.

This openness to connectivity is an aspect of network dynamics, I think, and it has to do with a shift in the way value is created in a network as opposed to a hierarchical structure. In a hierarchy, one's relative value is measured by the number of people under one and subject to one. In a network, one's relative value is measured by the number of people willing to connect to one. This is an obvious oversimplification, but it points to a seriously different dynamic in the relationships among people in a functional group. The relationships in hierarchical groups are based more on power, benevolent or otherwise, while the relationships in network groups are based more on mutual attraction. Engagement or not is up to the agent, and this is a powerful kind of agency.

This radical shift in agency demands an equally radical shift in ethics. It seems to me that ethics for the past few hundred years has been based on the need to manage exchanges across discrete boundaries. In other words, reductionist thought makes each of us a position within a hierarchy—a "cog in something turning" as Joni Mitchell put it—with quite distinct boundaries between positions, or agents, and agency has been defined in terms of who gets to tell whom what to do and how to think and how to reward and punish those exchanges. This kind of ethics, this Lockean social contract, does not work if, as a node in a network, you have no fixed position, if you are free to engage or disengage connections, and if the connections depend on mutual attraction, as they do in MOOCs. We need an ethics of complex, multi-scale networks, which is partly how I define a MOOC. Perhaps such an ethics exists, but I don't know about it (any philosopher out there willing to enlighten me. I'm a fairly quick read.)

So I revise what I said earlier about connectivism having a built-in ethics. It doesn't. Rather, it seems to me that the openness of connectivism and its MOOCs calls for a new ethics based on a rethinking of agents, their boundaries, and their exchange processes. The ethics that works for an agent occupying a position in a reductionist hierarchy will not work for an agent acting as a node in a dynamic, complex, multi-scale network. The networked, connectivist agent needs a new ethics that guides the dynamic choices that help identify useful connections and cultivate those connections and eventually close some of those connections. To put this in MOOC terms, MOOCers need a new ethics that guides their choices about which MOOCs to engage, which agents and content within the MOOC to engage, and how to engage: how to both give and take value within their networks. Actually, I think give and take are the wrong terms, too strongly tied to the reductionist, hierarchical ethics with its exchanges across discrete boundaries. We need an ethics that helps us become value within a network, increasing the value of the network to the benefit of the entire network. I suspect, then, that ecological movements may be working out the details of the kinds of ethics that I'm looking for. I'll have to check into that.

This leads me to Dan's comments about elitism and that he doesn't see his "students getting very far in their rhizomatic education." If he means that, unlike elite students, most college students lack the internal motivation and skills to engage an open network of inquiry and discussion, such as cMOOCs, then he's probably correct. Aside from the graduate courses at elite universities, too much of our education is an exercise in what Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus, 1987) call tracing, a careful, meticulous repetition of patterns and truths already laid out for us in a curriculum and watched over by proctors keen on sameness and competence. Open cMOOCs call for mapping, or a process of "active construction based on flexible and functional experimentation, requiring and capitalizing on feedback" (Cheun-Ferng Koh, 1997). Thus, our students have learned to trace well, but they see no advantage in going outside the line, in mapping new territory for themselves or others. The last thing a successful student wants to do on a test is to tell the teacher something that she doesn't already know. That is largely and by default defined as failure. Tracing well does not prepare one for success in a MOOC. Actually, that skill frustrates both the MOOC and the student.

If, on the other hand, Dan means that in the open network of a MOOC a few students will attain more status and value than most others, then he is also correct. The power laws of scale-free networks express the strong probability that some nodes will be more well connected than most other nodes. This happens in every MOOC that I have engaged. Often, the teacher or weekly leader in a MOOC is a highly connected node, but I suspect that this is in some part residue from traditional education, in which the teacher is the ONLY well-connected node in the hierarchy (too often connections among students—talking—are censured and censored). In the best MOOCs, sub-networks develop as students connect to each other in their engagement of a mutually interesting and enriching discussion. MOOCs encourage this kind of networking within the network, and often enough, one or two nodes of those sub-networks gain more status, become elite, through more connections from other nodes. I do not see a problem with this, but I do think it is distracting to those students who are looking for the correct content to trace competently rather than for the new content to map usefully.

Finally, like Dan, I wonder if education can do without theory and practice. I think it can, but only if we are thinking of theory and practice as mechanisms for promoting tracing rather than mapping. When many first-time MOOCers move from tracing in the traditional classroom to mapping in a MOOC, then they feel a loss of theory and practice. They are disoriented. The lines drop out from under their feet, and this causes real stress and grief for many, which those students have expressed in blog posts, tweets, and feedback in many of the MOOCs I've engaged. And these are elite students, by the way.

So as with the call for a new ethics, I think MOOCs call for a new theory and practice in education especially, and I'm fairly certain that this new theory and practice will strike many of us as NO theory and practice. I think Deleuze can offer some suggestion here. I read an article by Xiao-Jiu Ling called Thinking like Grass, with Deleuze in Education? (Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, Vol 7, Num 2, 2009) in which Ling draws so tempting implications from Deleuzianal thought:

Then, what could Deleuze mean to the field of Education? My first temptation is to simply boldly borrow his phrase above and to propose thus: There is no need for education: it is necessarily produced where each activity gives rise to its line of deterritorialization. To get out of education, to do never mind what so as to be able to produce it from outside! [italics in the original] Perhaps, it is indeed a Deleuzian repetition that we can aim for in education, a kind of repetition that is a transgression, in which its possibility hinges on opposing as much to moral (nomos) law as to natural (physis) law (DR, p. 2-3). By working in opposition to the order of the always already-existing laws, in the spirit of parrhēsia prefigured by Diogenes the Cynic, Deleuze is proposing new possibilities of working in the direction of creating artistic realities; that is, to treat philosophy itself as an artistic endeavour in its essential nature. And if one is to realize the fundamental role that education plays in forming our frames of thinking, that is, providing existing and always the dominant images of thought of our society in general, the relevance of Deleuze’s analysis and his “anecdotes” of philosophizing is hard to deny. Or, at least we are tempted to make this parallel: that if philosophy can be made fecund with the open-mindedness of an artist, then the work of education can also be made fertile through the exigency of treating it as an artistic engagement, something that not only demands creativity but more importantly a critical consciousness of the ethical dimension that is inherent in education. (43,44)

Well, let's talk about this some more, later.

More Agency, Rhetoric, and Connectivism

If agency is the ability to recognize and respond to the surround, then does agency fit with connectivism? Yes. In fact, I can't think of an educational theory that agency does not complement. Education is hardly understandable without some notion of agency on either the teacher's part, the student's part, or usually both parts. But is agency in connectivism distinguishable from agency in behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism? I think so.

In her article Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted (CCC 62:3, 420-449), Marilyn M. Cooper locates her concept of rhetorical agency in the same theoretical framework as connectivism: complexity theory, and for her the acting agent is a complex system within a complex system. She is quite clear that the agent is not a classical subject, or a "centered, conscious, rational self", and she defines her task as rescuing the notion of agency from the "death of the subject" (420). She begins this rescue by denying the existence of the subject: "a workable theory of agency requires the death not only of the modernist subject but of the whole notion of the subject" because "the subject is inescapably defined by an agonistic relation to the object/other: the subject attempts to control the object/other in order to escape being controlled" (423).

As I understand her, Cooper is troubled by the inherent and unavoidable power struggle in a modern, reductionist view of the subject – a view I associate with behaviorism and cognitivism. As long as we view agents as discrete subjects distinct from and independent of the objects/others around them, then we cannot avoid sliding into issues of power. Indeed, the agency of a modernist subject can only be viewed in terms of power: the ability of the subject to effect change in an object through the exercise of power, however benign or well-intentioned. This idea of agency as power neatly captures the traditional notion of education: a teacher/school effecting change in students through the exercise of power, usually well-intentioned. We then measure the amount of change in the students to determine the efficacy of the teacher/school. It's a wonderfully simple model that seems as if it should work. One could almost wish it did.

Cooper replaces subject with actor/agent, which she borrows from Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory: "Unlike subjects, agents are defined neither by mastery, nor by determination, nor by fragmentation. They are unique, embodied, and autonomous individuals in that they are self-organizing, but by virtue of that fact, they, as well as the surround with which they interact, are always changing" (425). Agency is an emergent property of the interactions of agents with their surround, "the process through which organisms create meanings through acting into the world and changing their structure in response to the perceived consequences of their actions" (426). In other words, we perturb the world, Prufrock notwithstanding, and the world perturbs us in return. In the patterns of this interaction, we come to recognize and know our intentions and agency. Does this complex agency have a place in connectivism? I think so.

Both Cooper's concept of agency and connectivism, then, are grounded in complexity theory. In his blog post What is the unique idea in Connectivism?, George Siemens says that connectivists "find support for connectivism in the more nebulous theories of complexity and systems-based thinking." In his article Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge, Stephen Downes notes that knowledge itself is an emergent property of the interactions of neurons: "human thought amounts to patterns of interactions in neural networks." Knowledge does not lie in any neuron or any grouping of neurons but in the emergent patterns of neuronal interactions and networking.

While Siemens and Downes both ground their thinking in complexity theory, I find the most useful treatment for agency in David Cormier's concept of the community as curriculum. In his 2008 article Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum, Cormier describes how curriculum itself can be an emergent property of a community of learners: "In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions."

To my mind, Cooper's concept of agency fits quite nicely into Cormier's community as curriculum, particularly as expressed in connectivist MOOCs. Agency, curriculum, and knowledge all emerge as properties of the interactions of a community of learners, and all three are the trajectories of the patterns of interactions among the various nodes of the community. As learners join a community such as a MOOC, their very presence (even lurkers) perturbs the community, which in turn feeds back into the learner's own mind. The dynamic interplay and interaction of learners, artifacts, and network enables patterns of intention and mapping, in Deleuze's terms, to emerge, and our awareness of these patterns helps us to articulate, mentally and physically, the agencies, knowledges, and curricula that bubble up out of the brew.

I think I have more to say about agency and the rhizome, especially in light of Cormier's use of the term and Cooper's dismissal of Deleuze and Guattari, but not tonight.

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.

What's the Matter with MOOCs?

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article entitled What's the Matter with MOOCs?, Siva Vaidhyanathan dismisses the current obsession with MOOCs as "something that very wealthy private institutions offer for free, at a loss, as a service to humanity." He adds insult to injury by adding that he, indeed, enjoys MOOCs: "Let me pause to say that I enjoy MOOCs. I watch course videos and online instruction like those from the Khan Academy … well, obsessively. I have learned a lot about a lot of things beyond my expertise from them. My life is richer because of them. MOOCs inform me. But they do not educate me. There is a difference."

Those of us who have actually been in a MOOC will find Vaidhyanathan's argument silly at best and outrageously unfortunate at worst (kudos to John Mak for trying to correct Vaidhyanathan's errors). His failure to understand MOOCs is catastrophic and staggering. Vaidhyanathan has failed scholarship and done a great disservice to the Academy and its conversation about MOOCs, which have almost nothing to do with online video banks or rich, private universities, but with collaborative communities created more often than not from somewhat remote, public universities. Still, I suppose this sort of misunderstanding is bound to happen.

Eventually, any theory or practice worth its salt moves beyond its origins and begins to take on a life of its own. The same will happen to Connectivism. Others will begin to define and shape Connectivism, perhaps in ways that Downes and Siemens do not anticipate and will not support, but it will happen if Connectivism doesn't die first. It seems to be happening more quickly with MOOCs. Luck of the draw?

I'm not sure, but I do have a connectivist/rhizomatic explanation for it that turns me back to my own discipline of writing. A newly-minted theory (and Connectivism is still rather new in the history of educational theory) is like a newly-minted book (or a newly-minted baby, nation, or computer system): it has a generative point with a rather limited DNA, but once it is released into the eco-system, then the theory (or book, baby, nation, system) takes on its own life, direction, and development that the originators (or writer, parents, founders, inventors) seldom anticipate and never control. I'm reminded of a story about Robert Frost reading his poem The Road Not Taken, and afterward, responding to a young woman who asked him what the famous poem really meant. He asked her in turn what she thought it meant; whereupon, she spoke at length. When at last she concluded, he said that, from then on, that's what the poem would mean to him.

I don't know if the story is factual, but it is true, and Frost was wise to understand that the meaning of his poem no longer belonged to him, unless he wanted to rewrite the poem, and then it would just be another poem that he would eventually lose control of.

Of course, Cormier, Downes, and Siemens, along with others, are still writing Connectivism and MOOCs, and I'm certain that they still have points to add and clarify, but really, they can only supply the generative DNA. The growth and development of Connectivism and MOOCs will depend on so much more. Let's hope that they enjoy watching their baby grow.