Ethics for MOOCs: Provisional Boundaries

Woermann and Cilliers posit four mechanisms that reinforce and promote the critical attitude: provisionality, followed by transgressivity, irony, and imagination. To my mind, mechanism is an unfortunate term, as none of the four seem mechanical; rather, I would call them heuristics, having more to do with experimentation in contact with the real, as Deleuze and Guattari say it, than with a device for reliably and regularly framing the world. These four mechanisms are bricolage for bricoleurs.

Given our incomplete knowledge of any complex system—and I think that all naturally occurring systems are complex as are many human-created systems such as MOOCs—it should be obvious that knowledge is provisional and, thus, the ethics based on that knowledge is provisional. While we must frame knowledge and ethical responses to complex spaces, we must simultaneously hold that our frames are in some way inadequate both when shifted to other contexts and within our own contexts. Let's see how.

That meaning, knowledge, and ethics change when we shift contexts is almost trivial to say. Even children can sense, if not adequately explain, the different meaning in the words "I love you" when spoken by different people in different situations. Indeed, the words don't mean much without a context. Likely when you just read the words I love you, you automatically supplied a context in your mind to help the words mean something. Without context, there is almost no meaning, and different contexts mean different meanings. Most of the world's love stories are based on two people using the same words from different contexts. Much of humor relies on things said or done in the wrong context (this touches both on transgressivity and irony, which I'll discuss later).

But the provisional nature of knowledge and ethics is even more subtle than this as both knowledge and ethics are uncertain even within a given context. Language, knowledge, and ethics never come to us pure, but they are always stained with their use in other contexts. Woermann and Cilliers quote Bakhtin, who says in his 1984 book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics:

The life of the word is contained in its transfer... from one context to another context... In this process the word does not forget its own path and cannot completely free itself from the power of these concrete contexts into which it has entered. (452)

When we say "I love you", we cannot unsay all the other times we have said the same, for better or for worse, in other contexts, nor can we unsay all the other times the other has heard these words said. We cannot even unsay all the times countless others have said and heard these words. Our boundaries leech. Our frames do not hold absolutely against the outside. Perhaps this is one reason we so often envelope ourselves in emotional frames: to insulate ourselves from the knowledge of other contexts, to focus ourselves on taking the desired action quickly regardless of what we know, to forbid our knowledge and ethics from interfering with what we are passionate to do.

Not only do contexts leech the outside in, they are never complete in themselves. As Woermann and Cilliers note (453), Derrida says in Living On: Border Lines (1979) that "no context permits saturation." Woermann and Cilliers add that "every context is open to further description" and "[t]here are no final meanings that arrest the movement of signification" (453). Even when we position ourselves within a context in order to know what we know and to act as well as we can, our given context is open to further description, further interpretation. We can always know more, and that more always changes our knowledge and understanding.

We are always in trouble. We must make decisions, and the frames that inform our decisions are provisional. Most people do not like this tension, and they work very hard to simplify the complexity of life to render decision-making—which is the heart of ethics—into binary choices, into Thou shalt or Thou shalt not, into nothing can exceed the speed of light or you can understand any phenomenon by breaking it down into its smallest constituents and describing its fundamental interactions. Here is my problem with fundamentalists: not that they do or do not have a different frame than I, but that they insist that theirs is the only frame, the only context. Moreover, the true fundamentalists see it as their job or calling to destroy all frames and contexts other than their own. We have a long history of religions trying to stamp out competing religious frames, but we currently have a strong movement among atheists to stamp out all religious frames. To my mind, both are highly unethical attempts to destroy competing frames and to force their one, true frame onto others.

In a way, fundamentalists want to destroy ethics or to reduce it to a binary choice. Fundamentalism always posits absolute, universal rules, which reduces the complexity of ethics to simple choices: either one honors thy father and thy mother or one does not. A complex ethics rejects simple, binary choices.

A complex ethics also rejects an anything goes relativism that says all choices are the same. This is another way to reduce the burden of ethical choices. If all choices are the same, then just pick whatever is convenient. A complex ethics, however, accepts the constant burden of making choices with incomplete knowledge within restricted contexts.

This, I think, is a key stance for anyone engaging a complex learning space such as a MOOC. Even within the context of the MOOC, one cannot have complete knowledge, can't read it all, can't know everyone. MOOCs seem to work better if participants declare their own points of view, while opening space for others to do the same. MOOCs seem to work better when participants constantly reassess their own frames in light of other frames. Finally, MOOCs seem to work better when participants are willing to transgress their own boundaries when those boundaries, those frames, become inadequate to accommodate different, insistent knowledge and behaviors. This sounds like a recipe for ethics, but that's a trick of language—it isn't a recipe, it's a stance, a habit of mind, a heuristic, a cultivated tendency. It can happen in a moment, in a flash of insight, or it can unpack and emerge over the course of many MOOCs. It's a practice that is never mastered, never finished. It's a way of acting. It's complex ethics. It isn't the Way—it's a manner of walking. It isn't the Truth—it's a manner of conversing and mapping. It isn't neat and tidy enough to be a rule, but at best, a rule of thumb. It is not a social contract. I'm not opposed to contracts, but that ain't what I'm talking about.

I'll talk more about transgressions next. It seems that they are ethical after all.

A More Practical View of the Rhizome for #rhizo14

Well, I intended to write a practical view of the rhizome in my last post, but I basically ended up giving my take on the place of the rhizome metaphor in the general development of Western thought over the past few centuries. That seems too general and abstract to be practical, so I want to try again in this post to make the rhizome—as I understand it—concrete. To help keep me grounded, I'll latch onto a specific discussion that Dave has started in this first week: learning as cheating.

I glanced through lots of the comments on the #rhizo14 site and on Google+, but I'm mostly responding to the discussion between Dave Cormier and Jenny Mackness. It seems to me that Dave uses the intentionally flagrant concept of cheating to get us to rethink our assumptions about education. As he says in his unhangout response to Jenny's blog post Rhizomatic Learning and Ethics, "I'm trying to make the assumptions we have about learning a problem." He's done that.

But I would say it slightly differently. Dave doesn't need to make our assumptions about education a problem—they are already a problem. As I suggested in my last post, most of our assumptions about education and almost all the working assumptions of our educational institutions are grounded in and shaped by the reductionist, mechanical view of reality that we inherited from the Enlightenment. It does not surprise me, then, that our concepts of cheating will vary depending on our context for defining it. If we view cheating in the framework of the social contract of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, then cheating means one thing. If we view cheating in the framework of Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome, then it means something else. For me, cheating in a clockwork universe is not the same as cheating in a rhizomatic universe—though I insist that cheating is a useful concept in both. How they differ will help me explain something practical about the rhizome—I hope.

I'll start with a common definition of the word cheat:

1. act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage, esp. in a game or examination, "she always cheats at cards"; deceive or trick. "he had cheated her out of everything she had" synonyms: swindle, defraud, deceive, trick, scam, dupe, hoodwink, double-cross, gull; informal be sexually unfaithful. "his wife was cheating on him" synonyms: commit adultery, be unfaithful, stray; 
2. avoid (something undesirable) by luck or skill. "she cheated death in a spectacular crash" synonyms: avoid, escape, evade, elude; archaic help (time) pass. "the tuneless rhyme with which the warder cheats the time"

I want to explore cheating as a boundary issue to show that the mechanistic view of boundaries is quite different from the rhizomatic view. First, let's note that cheating is a human activity—rocks and animals don't cheat. Even when animals play games—and they frequently do—we usually don't say that they cheat. Similarly, we would not likely say that a mare cheated on her stud. Animals may trick, deceive, hoodwink, and steal from each other, but it doesn't carry the same stain of cheating as it does with us, so in this discussion, I'm talking about human behavior across human boundaries.

The mechanistic view of classical liberalism assumes that humans are discrete individuals with certain unalienable Rights, [and] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, to use the words of Thomas Jefferson. Classical liberalism defines humans as unique, independent, discrete individuals, it defines clear boundaries separating individuals, and it defines the acceptable and unacceptable exchanges across those boundaries. It can do this, in part, because it sees society as a large mechanism, with clearly defined parts that interact in clearly defined ways. Violations of those definitions of parts or interactions are sanctioned legally, while adherence to those definitions are reinforced in myriad ways. One can change the role one plays (move up or down in the organization), but one is still expected to play the role correctly. One must accept the boundaries between themselves and others and make proper exchanges across those boundaries, just as the parts in a clock do.

This is nice for clocks, and we wanted it to work for schools. We defined parts/roles: student, teacher, administrator, counselor, etc. We defined knowledge: curricula, subjects, disciplines, etc. We defined learning times: school day, periods, terms, etc. We defined learning spaces: classrooms, labs, etc. But we always defined in a certain way: from the outside in, or as Dave Cormier says we defined by locking things up in little boxes, with clear boundaries. This is how definition works in a mechanistic worldview: clearly defined entities within clearly defined boundaries making appropriate exchanges with other clearly defined entities across those boundaries.

If schools were really clocks, then this would work wonderfully, and cheating would be a clear concept. If I as a student look on your test paper, then I am violating a clear boundary to unfairly steal your knowledge, or at least your answer. Such cheating is policed and punished. Only the teacher can look on the students' test papers. We were all born and raised with some subset of this kind of thinking. It makes sense to us, and we don't like it when our cherished boundaries are violated or moved or upset—at least, I don't.

But schools are not clocks. They are messy rhizomes, and in a complex rhizome, boundaries are not such clear and obvious entities. I've written a fair amount in this blog about boundaries, so I won't repeat all that, but suffice it to say that for modern science, boundaries are not at all a clear issue. For instance, in the traditional view, I should be clearly defined by my body, yet modern science says that my body is about 90% bacteria which I apparently share widely with others, even others of different species, and they share with me. I regularly exchange the energy and information that constitutes my body with my eco-system. My boundaries are fluid, interpenetrating me and others (human and non-human alike), and it is becoming increasingly difficult to say just where my body, much less the more nebulous my self, begins or ends.

Cilliers says that we can create boundaries because we are always working within a context, but then he notes that when the context changes, the boundaries change. This lands us directly into the problem of relativistic, situational ethics that fundamentalists hate so much. We have no absolute knowledge, but we do have knowledge.

So what is cheating in the rhizome? I would tell you if I knew, but I don't. The problem with rhizomatic/complexity thinking is that we are still figuring it out. We do not yet have—at least, I don't have—all the concepts and language we need to talk about ethics in the rhizome. I have faith that ethics makes sense in the rhizome, but I'm pretty sure that it won't be the ethics that work in a clock.

Still, I think we have some pointers. First, we define differently in the rhizome: from the inside out, rather than the outside in. I can see this clearly in terms of DNA. If we define from the outside in, then our DNA (color of skin, height, IQ, etc.) is the endpoint and it defines or limits who we are. A mechanistic definition locks us in a tight little box bounded by our DNA. If, on the other hand, we define from the inside, then our DNA (color of skin, height, IQ, etc.) is the beginning point of who we are. A rhizomatic definition opens us to an ecosystem in which our DNA can unfold, finding its own space and limits. It's kind of like a game of cards: you don't have to be defined by the cards that you are dealt (something that you have no choice about); rather, you can be defined by how you play the cards you are dealt (something that you DO have a choice about). Of course, it's likely that you are defined a bit by both your DNA and how it unpacks itself.

Of course, we recognize in this shift in how we define people echoes of the civil rights movement, the women's movement, self-actualization, and lots of other social movements of the past 50 years, including the MOOC movement. MOOCs open the learning space so that students (that's you and me) can define ourselves from the inside out rather than having the school or teacher (that's Dave Cormier) define us from the outside in. I'm being unfair to Dave. He's trying valiantly NOT to define us, but rather to challenge us to define ourselves—to become our own curriculum.

A second pointer toward ethical behavior in the rhizome has to do with rethinking boundaries. Boundaries are not rigid lines that separate and limit, as the mechanistic world view suggests; rather, boundaries are flexible zones of engagement. We cannot insulate ourselves from others and our environment; we can only engage skillfully, intelligently, and honestly. We can join a MOOC and then connect to people, exchanging ideas, exploring the conversation, propagating knowledge.

Of course, we hear in this echoes of all those organic concepts that have arced through society over the past 50 years. Indeed, most of what has been noteworthy and newsworthy over the past century—even the fundamentalist, reactionary backlash—has been this monumental shift in human consciousness from a mechanistic mode of thinking to complexity thinking, from the clock to the rhizome. For myself, I enjoy being part of something this big. All of us in this #rhizo14 MOOC are exploring this shift, and Dave kicked it all off with cheating. Nice rhetorical move, that.

Well, was that any more practical? I can't tell from the inside. But it's a beautiful day here in south Florida, so I'm going outside. You come, too.

Emergent Boundaries

In their article Complexity and transdisciplinarity – Discontinuity, levels of Reality and the Hidden Third (2012, Futures 44, 711–718), Paul Cilliers and Basarab Nicolescu discuss the implications of emergence for boundaries. They say that:

The properties of a complex system are not confined to the properties of the individual components in isolation. The relationships between the components give rise to new properties which can be called emergent.

Emergence is a commonly recognized feature of complex systems, and it basically says that the properties of a complex system are not limited to its constituent parts; rather, new properties—new structures and behaviors—can emerge from the dynamic functions within the complex system and between the complex system and its ecosystem. The boundaries of a complex system must be elastic enough to include any newly emerging properties. Perhaps a better way to say this is that our definitions of the boundary of any complex system should be pliable enough to recognize that the shape of the complex system has changed. As the complex system rearranges its structure and develops new properties through its own internal activities and its external exchanges with its environment, then we must anticipate the emergence of new boundaries.

I'm old enough to have witnessed the many changes to the boundaries of my bank account. I am not old enough to have known when a bank account consisted of metal coins stored in a vault and data security consisted of a big lock and an armed guard. However, I think that most people still have this physical, mechanical view of their money and how to secure it. I fear that too many data security people also have this view.

Consider, for instance, my bank account: I'm in Florida, the bank's corporate offices are in Virginia, the online banking applications I use may be on servers in a third location or in distributed locations, the billing center is in Atlanta, the data could be housed in some data center operated by a third party company in a fifth location, the help center is in India, and each geographical location likely has different regulatory controls and business practices, certainly different data security practices. So just where the hell is my money, and how do I define the boundaries around this amorphous monster? Is it not obvious that assigning boundaries to my money is no longer like assigning boundaries to a stack of coins? And is it not obvious that my bank account has emergent properties and interactions that I'm probably not aware of, that perhaps no single person is aware of all the emergent properties of even this one, small account? Finally, consider the financial accounts of a Warren Buffett or an Apple, Inc., and I defy anyone to draw neat boundaries, or even ragged ones, around those puppies.

Cilliers and Nicolescu make another important point about boundaries as emergent properties of complex systems:

It is common to argue that the system is more than the sum of its parts. This is true to the extent that emergence is not simply a result of the characteristics of the components. However, in some sense the system is also less than the sum of its parts. The emergent properties of the system constrain the behavior of the system to the extent that not all the possible characteristics of the components of the system can be realized in the dynamic interaction which constitutes the system. (715)

Boundaries, then, have a complex role to play in complex systems. They not only set the limits of the internal interactions within the system, but they also form the zone of engagement between the system and its ecosystem. As Cilliers and Nicolescu say it, "Boundaries operate with the purpose to demarcate, but also, and essentially, to connect" (716).

In complex systems, boundaries are always problematic, and as near as I can tell, that makes data security problematic. Boundaries always demarcate, but they also, and essentially, connect. No complex system can have a boundary that does not connect as well as separate. Ahh, there's the rub.

Boundaries as Enabling, not Confining

Next, I want to work through an article by Paul Cilliers called Knowledge, limits and boundaries (2005, Futures, 37, 605–613). Prof. Cilliers is mostly exploring the concept of knowledge, but he makes some observations about how knowledge is entangled with boundaries and limits that can help us understand better the problematic nature of data security.

Cilliers first notes that we should avoid thinking of boundaries as "something that separates one thing from another" (611). Rather, boundaries are those things that constitute "that which is bounded." Without a functioning boundary, there is no defined, bound thing that we can know or interact with. In other words, without a functioning boundary, I have no bank account. My account ceases to exist as an entity or thing, and whatever data it contained, or defined, is dissipated into larger systems. Our consideration of boundary, then, shifts from an attempt to keep things out (something that separates one thing from another) to an effort to express things within (something that constitutes that which is bounded). This reminds me of Edgar Morin's advice in On Complexity that we must learn to define things from the inside out and not from the outside in. Data security begins with constituting and maintaining the integrity of the data as an entity. It begins on the inside by defining outwardly what constitutes my bank account, for instance. Boundaries, then, are a push outward toward the functional limits that say, in effect, this account has this structure, this much data/money, at this time, and no more.

This push outward suggests that boundaries are dynamic and malleable, or as Richardson and Lissack say, boundaries "are emergent, critically organized, and temporary." Cilliers says it a little differently:

The boundary of a complex system is not clearly defined once it has ‘emerged’. Boundaries are simultaneously a function of the activity of the system itself, and a product of the strategy of description involved.

 A boundary, then, is the outer limit of the entity and the expression of the entity's internal functions, growth, and changes and its exchanges and interactions with its ecosystem. The boundary, however, is not merely an epiphenomenon, a secondary byproduct, of the entity. Rather, it is a functioning, constitutive aspect of the entity and a major aspect by which we humans can describe the entity, recognizing it as distinct in some way from its surroundings. But it is never static and fixed. Even in so simple a system as my bank account, the boundaries wax and wane as data/money flows in and out and as the number and character of interactions with larger economic systems shift.

The second point that Cilliers makes follows from this dynamic, malleability of the boundaries of a complex system. Our usual habits of mind tell us that any entity occupies a contiguous space. A turtle, for instance, is all inside itself and everything non-turtle is outside. In the practical, everyday world, this may be a useful way to frame reality, but this insistence on all of the turtle being inside the turtle is certainly not true of social or virtual entities. Social groups such as English teachers or skateboarders exist in disparate locations. They can clearly function as a group, but specifying the enclosing boundary can be very problematic. Even my bank account is problematic. It can exist in multiple places, which is both a convenience and a problem.

Because social, virtual, and quantum entities can exist in different spatial locations, then "non-contiguous sub-systems could be part of many different systems simultaneously. This would mean that different systems interpenetrate each other, that they share internal organs" (Cilliers, 611). My bank account is part, however minuscule, of my bank's general balance, on the ledger of checking accounts, and in whatever other aggregates the bank finds useful. Throw in the more than 400,000 ATMs just in the US alone, and the boundaries of my bank account start squirting out everywhere. This is the benefit and the burden of virtual entities, but it isn't limited to virtual entities. Our physical transportation lanes (roads, airways, shipping lanes, etc) have similarly extended and made fluid the boundaries of countries, companies, militaries, goods, and services. And if we add the people who have knowledge of my bank account as, for instance, bank employees, it becomes even more complex. The awareness of the data in my bank account leaves the bank each day as an accountant to become a parent, spouse, part-time student, or whatever else, and the carry with them the data in my account, even if they are unaware of it. My data is now sharing internal organs with systems around the world. How do you like my boundaries now?

I think that most things in the universe are complex systems, rather than simple or complicated systems; thus, I believe that most entities have complex boundaries such as Cilliers has described. This means that even my knowledge of boundaries is a complex system with complex boundaries. I can push the limits of my knowledge, and this pushing shifts the boundaries. This knowledge can interpenetrate other knowledge systems, for instance, my knowledge about story telling or your knowledge about MOOCs, and this internal development and external interpenetration makes for very complex boundaries, which makes it very difficult for me to fix a definition of my understanding of complex boundaries and about impossible to secure that understanding.

Complex boundaries also make for very complex approaches to data security. If, in fact, most data are complex systems or subsystems, then how do we think about securing their complex boundaries? If we start with the idea that boundaries enable an entity and enable our knowledge of that entity, then how do we go about securing that boundary? Good question. I'm still looking for an answer.

Dynamic, Complex Boundaries

So what do complex boundaries look like? I have to confess, I have rather vague ideas. Fortunately, some other people have done a fair amount of thinking about this issue, including poet Robert Frost, whom I've spoken about before, and I think we can learn something from them.

Before I get to Frost, I want to absorb the work of some other people, most of whom, unlike Frost, intentionally engage and think about complexity. I want to start with an article called On the Status of Boundaries, both Natural and Organizational: A Complex Systems Perspective (Emergence, ISSN: 1521-3250, 2002, 3(4): 32-49) by Kurt A Richardson and Michael R. Lissack. I start with them because of how they start their article: "Contemporary science with its strong positivism tends to trivialize the nature of boundaries." I think this says better, certainly more succinctly, what I was trying to say in my previous post: those who manage data security tend to trivialize the nature of boundaries, and this likely leads to most of their problems. I should probably go back and rewrite yesterday's post, but …

Anyway, Richardson and Lissack then go on to say that "Complexity thinking forces us to review our conceptions of what natural boundaries are", and the rest of the article attempts just that. They make some points that shed light on the issue for data security—and for education, by the way. I'll deal with data security in this post. They first establish, to my satisfaction at any rate, that boundaries are the foundation of knowledge—if we can't identify boundaries that distinguish one thing from other things, then we have difficulty saying we know that thing; however, our "boundary assumptions go unquestioned, resulting in flawed understanding and leading to flawed decisions and actions" (33).

As does Snowden's Cynefin Framework, they distinguish complex systems from complicated systems, but their distinctions rely more on scientific properties than on the organizational properties of Snowden. For Richardson and Lissack, complex systems are

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. (34)

While some complicated systems, computers for instance, can contain non-linear interactions, they are not complex. Unlike the prescribed and fixed sub-systems of a complicated system such as a jet airplane, complex systems have emergent and temporary sub-systems. This implies that the boundaries of complex systems are inevitably emergent and temporary, and all human organizations and their sub-organizations are complex systems. Richardson and Lissack say pointedly that "the boundaries describing subsystems in a complicated system are prescribed and fixed, whereas the boundaries delimiting subsystems in a complex system are emergent, critically organized, and temporary. By this definition most organizational working boundaries are those of a complex system" (36).

Herein lies the big problem for data security. Emergent and temporary boundaries don't merely complicate the data security issue, they complexify it. Boundaries emerge and wane, though many are stable enough for us to rely on over the course of a human lifetime. Many more are not so stable, but the point for an organization is that all boundaries will shift, wax, and wane. This is a physical fact.

Moreover, organizational boundaries are rendered further problematic by the fact of scale. Boundaries tend to exist at one scale of reality and not at another. For instance, the very thick, impregnable steel walls of a bank vault become quite porous and pregnable at the atomic scale. Information can leach through the thickest steel. Curiously enough, most modern information works at a very small scale which most of us, including data security experts, simply cannot imagine and at which we are not mentally or physically equipped to function.

Then, boundaries within even the most simple of structures are dynamic. Drawing on the work of Sommerer and Ott (1993, A physical system with qualitatively uncertain dynamics, Nature, 365: 138–40), Richardson and Lissack note that "even with qualitatively stable order parameters, qualitatively unstable behavior occurs" (40). When two systems interact—two people, for instance—then the boundaries cannot remain stable. We know this intuitively, but we design organizations and data security systems as if the boundaries surrounding our data are fixed and persistent. They are neither. They cannot be.

Richardson and Lissack conclude their article with a philosophical position called quasi-critical pluralism, a dynamic, dialogic position between objective realism on one hand and subjective constructivism on the other. That philosophical position deserves its own discussion, but later. As it is, I'm enjoying this line of thought, so I think I'll continue it for a few more posts.

Data Security and Boundaries

Data security is a problem for everyone, even for colleges and universities, as a recent post in The Chronicle suggests. Paul Voosen quotes Daniel K. Nelson, director of UNC-Chapel Hill's Office of Human Research Ethics, the team supposedly in charge on protecting sensitive data, "We're really just all waking up as a community to both the power and challenges of dealing with this." It is a serious issue, but I'm wondering if it is being defined correctly. If I take seriously what I've been reading lately about complex boundaries, then I know that I have to change how I think about data security.

It seems to me that data security has largely been framed in the simple or, at most, complicated domains according to Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework. This means that organizations have framed data security as a problem of enclosing well-defined, discrete data within well-defined, discrete boundaries, with well-defined rules for managing the exchange of that data across those boundaries with managed entities outside the boundaries. In this simple domain, the relationship between cause and effect is well known and explicit and people interact with the data according to best practices. This is something, I think, like the data in my checking account. That data is protected within strict boundaries, and the transactions, such as deposits, withdrawals, and inquiries, with that data follow well-defined best practices.

At least, that is how we define or frame the issue of protecting the data in my checking account. We want it to be a simple, airtight procedure, with reliable maintenance and audits of the data and reliable, verifiable exchanges between that data and the bank, my creditors, my employer, and me. The bank especially wants the process to be simple because it has millions of accounts, and it wants a simple procedure that it can reproduce and apply across all those accounts and rely on to protect the data in each account. Another way to say this is that we all want clear, inviolable boundaries around the data in my account, with well-defined and well-managed gateways through the boundaries that control the exchanges between the data on one side and appropriate stakeholders on the other side. This simple arrangement defines a simple system: my employer deposits data which I can use as money into my account regularly, the bank holds and protects that data, and my creditors appropriate some of that data regularly to keep my lifestyle going. The boundaries around the data protect the data and manage the interactions of the various stakeholders in this simple system. And by the way, it hardly matters if I stick to a strictly cash system. I move from virtual boundaries to physical boundaries (a safe or a weapon) to guard my data (money), but the relationships and boundaries retain pretty much the same functions.

Wouldn't it be nice if boundaries were really this simple? Unfortunately, they don't seem to be.

Rather, boundaries are complex. They are not merely complicated, which is just the simple multiplied with more parts and more gateways. Think of the complicated domain as a person (not me) with lots of data in lots of bank accounts with transactions among all those accounts and with all those various outside deposits, transfers, and withdrawals. The data security for this sort of complicated system likely requires much expertise to design and administer—not only  expertise from data security people, but also accountants and lawyers. Fortunately, my bank account is still in the simple domain, but I understand there are people whose numerous accounts are necessarily in the complicated domain "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." However, as with the simple domain, the complicated domain still has one or a few really good answers and practices, even if we often require experts to help us figure out what those answers and practices are.

The complex domain is different, for in this domain "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." These are the financial systems of gamblers (aka day traders) who have completely uncertain deposits, transfers, and withdrawals with uncertain stakeholders, and all within ecosystems or markets almost completely outside of their control. They can win much and lose much, but they can tell why only in retrospect. They can sense emergent practices, and experience can improve their chances, but they can never guarantee an outcome.

Of course, I think that all financial systems, just like all other systems, are complex. Only a long, stable economy can give us the illusion that our financial systems—such as my little bank account—are simple systems with regular, secure deposits and withdrawals and a set of clear, secure relationships among stakeholders: me, my employer, my bank, and my creditors. As the 2008 recession taught us, all accounts are complex, with uncertain transactions among uncertain stakeholders within an uncertain, dynamic financial ecosystem outside the control of anyone.

Likewise, data security is a complex system with complex emergent properties, and we will profit if we view it as a complex problem rather than a simple or even complicated problem. More on that tomorrow.

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.

Reality as a Zone of Engagement

So I've distinguished the Real from Reality and accepted that most of the Real is hidden, probably forever and not just from me but from my entire species, both because we physically cannot encounter it all and because, even if we could, we can't hold it all. Hmm … perhaps. This last point troubles me. I accept that I cannot hold it all, but what about we? Can we hold it all? Perhaps not, but we can certainly hold much more knowledge than I alone, and that may be sufficient for whatever tasks our species encounters. This is a thought that I will keep. Hold that thought.

At any rate, I now have the Real, Reality, and Knowledge. If I understand Nicolescu, Reality is the zone of engagement between the Real and the knower. Nicolescu describes this zone in, for me, rather interesting terms:

By "Reality" (with a capital R) we intend first of all to designate that which resists our experiences, representations, descriptions, images, or mathematical formulations.

Reality, then, is first that zone within the Real that in some way resists my pushes outward. Reality is the stuff I can bump into, the stuff that I can draw or sculpt or construct, the stuff that I can describe in words or mathematical formulations. Reality is the stuff that sends back a signal when I ping it. Group knowledge, I suppose then, is that zone within the Real that pushes back in similar enough ways when any of a group of us ping it.

I'm immediately troubled by my knowledge of those things—say, the Greek gods or Yoda—that I can push against and describe, but that I don't want to admit into the realm of Reality—and certainly not the Real—but let's not think about that for the moment. What I like about this description of Reality is the dynamic process of engagement between the Real and the knower, or between ontology and epistemology. Reality, I think, is first an emergent property of the interaction between my push outward and whatever pushes back. Of course, sometimes the Real pushes in first and I push back in response. In other words, reality as a zone of engagement is a reciprocal process, but the key is the dynamic interaction, the zone of engagement, out of which Reality emerges.

And here is the key for me in answering my original question: does epistemology take second seat to ontology? Perhaps it should; however, the moment-to-moment emergence of Reality within the interactions of the Real and the Knower seems to depend as much on the Knower (epistemology) as on the Real (ontology). I'm quite certain that Reality—the stuff that I know of the Real—depends as much, if not more, on my engagement with the Real and the processes by which I make sense of that engagement. In his wonderful book The Master and his Emissary (2012), psychiatrist and literary scholar (cool) Iain McGilchrist explores the two realities created by our divided brains, and he is quite explicit about the role we play in creating Reality:

In fact I believe there is something that exists apart from ourselves, but that we play a vital part in bringing it into being. A central theme of this book is the importance of our disposition towards the world and one another, as being fundamental in grounding what it is that we come to have a relationship with, rather than the other way round. The kind of attention we pay actually alters the world: we are, literally, partners in creation.

When I connect McGilchrist's book to Zull's book about the neuroscience of learning, it seems highly likely that my and our Reality depends as much on my/our neurological apparatuses and processes as it does on the ontological features of the Real.

However, I think, too, that the Real as well as Reality is changed by engaging with the Knower. If I understand my readings in quantum physics correctly, then many physicists accept that engaging the Real changes all parties of the engagement, the Knower/s as well as the Real itself. This seems counter-intuitive in day-to-day life. For instance, most of us assume that our car remains the same thing ontologically whether we are looking at it or not and regardless of the angle from which we look at it, but quantum physics seems to suggest that this is not so. While fine quantum weirdnesses are often flattened out in the coarse structures and processes of everyday life, this is not always so. In his Big Ideas talk The World as a Hologram (2011), quantum physicist Leonard Susskind tells the story of two friends Alice and Bob and what they both experience when Alice falls into a black hole. From Alice's point of view, nothing happens as she crosses the point of no return where she can no longer resist the inexorable pull of the black hole. However, from Bob's point of view, Alice is incinerated in a flash of unbelievable heat and disappears forever. In one reality, then, Alice is fine, but in the other reality, Alice is dead. At the same time. This makes no sense, but here's a serious, world-famous scientist insisting that it is the case.

So I don't think that epistemology quite plays second fiddle to ontology. I am increasingly coming to believe that the interactions across the zone of engagement between me and the Real not only change me, but they also change the Real. Engagement changes all parties to the engagement, and the Realities that emerge from that engagement depend very much on the relative positions of the engaged parties.

So what does this have to do with MOOCs and quantum random walks? Much it would seem.

Boundaries and the System

A fourth concept that Morin discusses in The Reform of Thought is the system, or organization. If I understand Morin correctly, then he means by system any self-organizing entity that pulls itself together  in such a manner that allows it to function as an entity and that provides the organized substrate for the emergence of properties and capabilities not necessarily inherent in the individual parts. The whole entity, then, is greater than the sum of the parts. For instance, consciousness is not a property of individual neurons, but it emerges when enough neurons self-organize into a functioning human brain within a functioning eco-system. As near as I can tell, systems appear to be all-inclusive—the ultimate vacation resorts. I cannot think of anything that is not both itself a system and a part of another system. Even strings on the micro-scale and the Universe on the macro-scale may be systems within systems. If string theorists are correct, then our Universe is just one system within a system of Universes. Maybe strings themselves are systems. After all, we once thought atoms were the smallest things possible, and we've moved way beyond that idea. We will likely move again.

This concept of system quite likely includes the other concepts that I've considered in my exploration of boundaries: the included middle, the dialogic, circular causality, and the holographic principle. Or perhaps I'm being drawn to the realization that all of these concepts suggest and implicate the others. Each of them, in true transdisciplinary fashion, is difficult to think about alone. Rather, they make more sense when seen as a whole. They represent the nature of boundaries as

• the included middles that join rather than separate but without merging, 
• the dialogics that juxtapose and hold in a creative, dynamic dance distinct entities, becoming the fertile zone where new things emerge and enrich both entities,
• the circular causalities that enable the flow of energy, matter, and information between the distinct entities, again enriching and sustaining both,
• the holographic principles that encode the whole within the part, like stem cells able to self-reproduce the entity, and finally,
• the systems that nestle systems within systems within systems.

Really. Can we understand any of this if we don't see that the part is within the system is within the part and that this is irreducibly loopy? Can we understand Mending Wall if we don't see that the narrator and the neighbor are a self-forming, self-organizing system, joined and at the same time distinguished at an included middle that expresses their dynamic dance and creates the zone in which they both assert their independence and their dependence, their individuality and their kinship, defining their independence in terms of their dependence and vice versa, and that echoes the patterns of molecules, societies, and stars.

Well, at any rate, I think that's what Mending Wall means to me. I have no idea what the poem meant to Robert Frost, and the question is somewhat irrelevant to my discussion which hasn't been about Frost but about boundaries. Still, I feel just strong enough to believe that, if he were here, I might persuade him.

Boundaries and the Holographic Principle

I've been thinking of boundaries as included middles, or zones of engagement, which transcend the separation of entities into discrete units required by the classical logic of the excluded middle—A is A, A is not non-A, and there is no entity T which is both A and non-A. The logic of the included middle demonstrates that T exists, and quantum physics and complexity theory say that T not only exists but is a fundamental feature of Reality. If you want to know how things work, then you must wrap your head around T, the included middle.

In my previous posts, I suggested that to my mind, Edgar Morin has provided us with several characteristics of boundaries as zones of engagement, or included middles, rather than lines of separation. The first two are the dialogic principle and circular causality. The third characteristic that I explore in terms of Frost's Mending Wall is the holographic principle, which Morin defines in The Reform of Thought (in Nicolescu's Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice, 2008):

In a system, in a complex world, not only is a part found in the whole (for example, we human beings are in the cosmos), but the whole is found in the part. Not only is the individual in the society but the society is within us since birth; it inculcated us with language, culture, its prohibitions, its norms. (26, 27)

I was fortunate to recently read a new book by Neal Shubin called The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People (2013), in which Mr. Shubin, a University of Chicago paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, demonstrates repeatedly how the patterns of the Universe—its energy, matter, and information—from the Big Bang to now are echoed within each of us, as well as within rocks, plants, and planets. The patterns for the human ear, for instance, were worked out some 350 million years ago in a fish called Panderichthys. The energy, material, and informational patterns of the Universe are echoed within each entity. As the fractal images of Mandelbrot have so beautifully shown us, self-similar patterns repeat and echo at each level of Reailty.

The most cursory exploration of the term holographic principle demonstrates that it has a rather specific meaning in quantum physics, which I do not have the skill or knowledge to discuss, but again, I think that Frost's poem Mending Wall can give the non-scientific among us a way to approach the idea and work with it usefully.

First, the poem paints for us the relationship between two men, the narrator and his neighbor, based in large part on the dialogic tension between their two points of view about walls: "something there is that doesn't love a wall", on the one hand, and "good fences make good neighbors", on the other. This dialogic tension, or pattern, echoes the patterns between electrons and nuclei or planets and stars. The dialogic relationship at each level is, of course, not identical, but I think it is self-similar. This pattern of an interactive tension between antagonistic entities is the stuff of life, certainly of human relationships (This tension does not necessarily suggest violence. Love has its own tensions, but that's another post.). It is this tension between Life and Death, Order and Chaos that allows for the development of the Reality. Like his predecessor William Blake, Frost is able to "see a world in a grain of sand" (Auguries of Innocence), or in a wall.

This echoing of patterns within and without and across different levels of reality suggests to me another way to think about Deleuze and Guattari's concept of decalcomania, which tries to capture the propagation of patterns throughout a system, or a rhizome. Something there is within each of us that recognizes patterns in the other and that echoes those patterns, that responds to the patterns of the Universe. If you yawn, I will yawn—it can be that ordinary. Note that the narrator responds to and echoes the patterns of his neighbor, for despite his dislike of walls, he is the one who calls to his neighbor to arrange their mending game. He responds to the pattern of the game and plays his part as well as the neighbor does.

Moreover, the narrator echoes the New England stubbornness of his neighbor. In the poem, we see the relationship between the two men only from the narrator's point of view. He views his neighbor as a primitive "old-stone savage armed" who "will not go behind his father's saying, / And he likes having thought of it so well / He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors." Clearly the narrator believes his neighbor to be stubbornly unenlightened, but can't we easily imagine the neighbor viewing the narrator in about the same light—or darkness: a fellow who keeps repeating the same old saw, "something there is that doesn't love a wall." The neighbor might be wondering—as the narrator does—why his neighbor can't see beyond his own narrow prejudices. The two men echo each other, and therein lies their game. Each holds within himself the pattern of the other. Together, they contain the patterns of the Universe, turning the wall between them into a zone of engagement, an included middle. I think.

Boundaries and the Loop of Circular Causality

A second characteristic to emerge from thinking of boundaries as included middles is circular causality, or the feedback loop. In The Reform of Thought (2008), Morin begins his explanation of circular causality by quoting Pascal: "I hold knowing the whole to be impossible if I do not know the parts nor can I know the parts if I do not know the whole." If I understand correctly, then Pascal is suggesting a loop of energy and information between the part and the whole, the entity and its ecosystem, this side and that. Neither the part nor the whole can exist without this loop, and this loop is greatly responsible for defining both the part and the whole. Think in terms of strings <—> atoms <—> molecules <—> cells <—> organs <—> bodies <—> families <—> societies  <—> planet <—> solar system <—> well, you get the idea.

Boundaries are the zones of engagement that enable the loop of energy and information into the individual and then out again into whatever systems the individual is a part. This loop of energy and information is not benign; rather, it changes both the individual and the system so that the individual develops by feeding and informing itself from its systems, and those systems in turn develop by feeding and informing themselves both from the individuals that make them systems and from the larger systems of which they are parts. Boundaries, then, are not cellophane wrappers, but semi-permeable membranes that help manage the ebb and flow of information and energy from the system to the individual and back again.

This loop is a fundamental characteristic of boundaries as included middles. This circular causality is fundamental to physical, chemical, biological, social, intellectual, and spiritual processes as well. It is the very life-blood of economics and of rhetoric and poetic. It is the eucharistic ground of Reality. We eat that we might engage that we might eat again. As Morin explains so clearly using ourselves as the examples:

An obvious example of this kind of loop is ourselves, because we are products of a cycle of biological reproduction in which we are, at the same time, producers, in order that the cycle continues. We are the product-producers. Thus, society is the product of interactions among individuals, but on the global level, in fact, new qualities emerge which, retroactive to individuals—language, culture— permit them to be fulfilled as individuals. Individuals produce the society that produces individuals. (The Reform of Thought, 25)

Frost's Mending Wall neatly embodies this loop, which by the way, is never resolved, for resolution is death. Mending Wall begins with the narrator's feed forward: Something there is that doesn't love a wall. The neighbor is a bit slow on the return, but finally in Line 27, he feeds back: Good fences make good neighbors. The narrator muses over this return shot, but volleys again in Line 36: Something there is that doesn't love a wall. Unperturbed, the neighbor returns the volley in the last line, Line 46: Good fences make good neighbors. The two mantras anchor the poem in the first and last lines, and they echo through the poem in Lines 27 and 36. And so they loop, round and round, and this circular causality gives the poem its life. It is the game between the narrator and neighbor that keeps them engaged that feeds both with information first, and then with energy. Each brings energy to the wall, exchanging both energy and information in a relationship that seems satisfactory and satisfying to them both. This circular causality is the bootstrap operation that creates the relationship that defines the two of them together and that makes the adjoining farms what they are.

I don't mean to suggest that this particular loop between this narrator and this neighbor is static and unchanging. It is not. Eventually, the exchanges of energy and information through this loop, especially when compounded with all the other loops at other boundaries in the lives of these two men, will lead to enough changes within the men that the exchanges between them will also change, and then the boundary itself will change. But the poem gives us a pleasing snapshot of the dynamic engagement between the narrator and his neighbor, and for me, that captures much of the dynamic nature of boundaries. It also says to me that boundaries are absolutely necessary. We must have those zones of engagement between ourselves and our environments. Otherwise, we die.

Morin draws two important inferences from this circular causality. First, "we have to deal with the product-producer" (25). This is a common theme on the Internet, where consumers of information have been turned into producers of information: or prosumers. More and more, we find it impossible to ignore the loop of energy and information between individuals and their societies as technology moves the means of production into the hands of individuals. At first, technology was only for the elite and privileged, but now it is for everyone. Not everyone likes that.

Second, we need "to understand the notion of self-production and self-organization" (25). This self-organization involves us in one of those fundamental, paradoxical dialogics: independence within dependence. As Morin says, "When we reflect on self-organization, we understand it as an ultimately paradoxical notion: a self-organized, self-producing reality consumed by energy. It therefore deteriorates; it therefore has a need to draw energy from its environment and, by the same token, to depend on this environment, which at the same time provides it with its autonomy" (25, 26).

These inferences capture some wonderful nuances in the relationship between the narrator and his neighbor. First, they are the products of the boundaries that they themselves produce. This production is not once and for all, but it deteriorates and requires regeneration; thus, as the narrator says, "on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again." Our boundaries require maintenance. Finally, the boundary defines both the autonomy and the dependence of the narrator and his neighbor. They are both decidedly what they are because of their interactions. They both have the integrity of self, but only within the context of each other. I think I like this loopy thinking.

Boundaries and the Dialogic

The included middle of Lupasco and Nicolescu gives me a convenient handle for understanding Edgar Morin's concept of the dialogic, which I first encountered in his book On Complexity but which is also discussed in his Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future (1999) and in his article The Reform of Thought, Transdisciplinarity, and the Reform of the University (in Nicolescu's Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice, 2008).

Dialogic is a form of thinking and talking that allows us to juxtapose antagonistic points of view without seeking to resolve them in a reductionist, Hegelian dialectic that simply moves "beyond contradictions through synthesis" (Reform of Thought, 26). As Morin explains it, dialogic "allows us to connect ideas within ourselves that are thrown back on each other" and allows us to contemplate "the necessary and complementary presence of antagonistic process or instances." Morin gives the profound examples of Life and Death, which are as antagonistic as is possible and yet which are both bound up with the other. Indeed, Reality unfolds as the constant engagement and interaction of Life with Death, and the one does not make sense without the other, and yet they are still antagonistic. Order and Disorder are similar antagonistic concepts, which complexity theory shows us are absolutely bound with each other and define each other. Life itself is a function of the engagement and interplay of Order and Disorder. Too much Order freezes and fixes a living thing—kills it—and too much Disorder leads to chaos—and again, death. Life exists in that fertile included middle that is the zone of engagement between Order and Disorder.

The dialogic, then, captures for me the interplay and engagement between the narrator and the neighbor in Mending Wall. The narrator begins the poem with a bold, bald assertion of his point of view: something there is that doesn't love a wall. The neighbor counters with an equally bold, bald, and contradictory statement: good fences make good neighbors. It is, as Frost says, "a kind of outdoor game." Frost is giving us a thesis and antithesis, and in our reductionist manner of thinking, we might reasonably expect a synthesis. I don't think there is one. There is only the dialogic between not wanting a wall and wanting a wall.

The dialogic in this poem juxtaposes two antagonistic positions and does not resolve them. We might think this a failure, but I don't think so. Rather, the resulting tension of the unresolved antagonism is the very source of the engagement between the narrator and his neighbor. It is the game between them, and this game, this engagement, joins them. Without the opposition, there is no game. Without the game, their is very little life. There is no diversity, no possibility of the exchanges of energy and information that make so rich our physical, social, intellectual, and spiritual lives. The dialogic recognizes and formalizes the dynamic, complex, and antagonistic engagements at the heart of all our games.

Because of our reductionist habits of mind, we see this juxtaposition of antagonistic sides as necessarily leading to the destruction of one side by the other through intellectual, emotional, or physical power or to the destruction of both sides in a synthesis, but Frost, Morin, Lupasco, and Nicolescu suggest a third way: "a way of reconnecting ideas without denying their opposition" (Reform of Thought, 26).

Boundaries and the Included Middle

So Mending Wall does not present us with a binary choice between the discrete individualism of reductionism and classical logic on the one hand or the undifferentiated unity of holism and mysticism on the other. Rather, the poem presents a third way, a middle way, but not in the Aristotelean sense of a Golden Mean or in the Hegelian sense of a synthesis. This way is definitely not from Aristotle, but rather from quantum physics and chaos and complexity theory, ideas that were just emerging when Frost was writing. The poem embodies something that Basarab Nicolescu calls the included middle, a concept that I still have not mastered but that is becoming increasingly important to my understanding of boundaries.

I first encountered the term included middle in Nicolescu's book Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (2002), a difficult book that I'm still not ready to discuss. According to Joseph E. Brenner in his essay The Logic of Transdisciplinarity (from Nicolescu's book Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice, 2008), "the logic of the included middle [was] developed by the Franc-Romanian philosopher Stèphane Lupasco (1900-1988) and extended by Nicolescu … [as a] needed replacement of the neoclassical logical framework that underlies current individual, social, and scientific paradigms" (155). As I understand it, the developments of quantum physics which sees light as both a particle and a wave at the same time establishes the need for a new logic to complement and transcend the old, classical logic, which Nicolescu (In Vitro and In Vivo Knowledge in Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice) says was "founded on three axioms:

1. The axiom of identity: A is A.
2. The axiom of noncontradiction: A is not non-A.
3. The axiom of the excluded middle: There exists no third term T ("T" from "third") which is at the same time A and non-A" (6).

According to this fundamental way of constructing Reality, light can either be a particle or a wave, but it can not be both at the same time. Quantum physics, however, said that light was both particle and wave and at the same time. Something had to give. Lupasco and Nicolescu decided that logic would give, and so they developed the logic of the included middle, and I think it is this included middle that Mending Wall captures for me.

The wall in the poem is, of course, the boundary between the narrator's farm and the neighbor's farm. It is also the boundary between the narrator's dislike of walls and the neighbor's like of them. According to the old logic then, traceable all the way back to Aristotle, the narrator's farm is the narrator's farm, it is not the neighbor's farm, and there is no middle ground that is both narrator's farm and neighbor's farm. This logic makes great sense at the level of common, everyday Reality. It puts everything in its place and keeps it there. Most of us act on this common, classical logic everyday.

But when we shift levels of Reality, then the limitations of this logic become obvious. Nicolescu says that natural science has discovered at least three different levels of Reality—"the macrophysical level, the microphysical level, and the cyber-space-time"—with a break in the laws and concepts applicable to each level. These levels exist simultaneously and through engagement with one another, and the contradictions at one level (A vs. non-A) become non-contradictory at another level. I do not have the skill with mathematics or formal logic to describe this for you, but I think the poem gives me a way of visualizing this concept. At the everyday scale, or Level B, of reality, the wall creates a boundary between the narrator's farm and the neighbor's farm such that each is itself and not the other and there is no middle zone that they both occupy. There is indeed a boundary between the two at Level B of Reality, and a person can step over that boundary. Or not. This defines our day-to-day existence at Level B. 

However, if I stand at the boundary and rise upward to the level of the macrophysical, to Level A, then the two farms become smaller and smaller until they become two dots and then one dot and then nothing. No boundary. Likewise, if I fall downward to the level of the microphysical, to Level C, then the two farms become larger and larger until they become molecules, atoms, and strings of vibrating energy. Again, no boundary, at least not between two farms. Thus, the contradiction at one level of reality is a non-contradiction at another level. It is not resolved, as it would be in a Hegelian dialectic, because the contradiction continues to exist on Level B at the same time that it does not exist at Levels A and C. There is no resolution, only a certain tension among the various points of view. The wall both is and is not at the same time. Turn your head one way, and it is. Turn your head the other way, and it is not. The wall is both actual and potential at the same time. Your knowledge of its state depends on your position relative to the wall.

Well, I think this is one way to think about the included middle. It's one way to think about boundaries.

Boundaries as Zones of Engagement

So in his poem Mending Wall, does Robert Frost really want to tear down our walls?

No, he doesn't. That is too naive a reading, and Frost is doing something far more interesting, I think. Frost is not locked into an either/or choice. As near as I can tell, Frost is defining boundaries neither as a line that separates nor as the point at which we all merge seamlessly into the Cosmos. Rather, Frost (if not the narrator) is defining boundary as a zone of engagement. For me, this is worth thinking about.

Note first that the wall is where the two farmers, the narrator and his neanderthal neighbor, meet and engage each other in "just another kind of out-door game, One on a side" (ll. 21,22). The wall/boundary does not separate the two men into discrete entities; neither does it merge them. Rather, the wall is the zone where each engages the other in a kind of game. Well, where else can we engage another except at the boundary and in some kind of game?

This zone of engagement has some specific features. First, it has thickness. It is not a thin line that sharply demarcates one farm from the other; rather, it is a zone. And this thickness does not suggest impermeability, but permeability as the narrator's farm gradually yields to the neighbor's farm. Indeed, where "He is all pine and I am apple orchard," we might easily see some pine cones dropped on this side and a few apples scattered on that side, and of course, the grass, as a rhizome, has a sneaking habit of spreading over, around, and through the wall to join this side with that. Boundaries are zones, membranes, and they filter—they don't seal. Clearly at some point far enough on either side of the wall is all one farm or the other, but at the boundary, there is slippage, seepage, and oozing. And the wall/boundary is a matter of scale. We know from the benefits of modern science that if we drill down to the molecular level deep within the stone that we will reach a scale where it is impossible to tell any longer whether we are on this side or that. The farms have merged. Or we can scale up to the view of satellites, and again we lose the boundary as both farms merge into the surround.

The wall in the poem is the zone of tension between the narrator and the neighbor. It's where all the exciting stuff happens. It's where all the compromises are made. All far enough on this side, of course, is narrator, and all far enough on that side is neighbor, but here at the wall, it isn't quite narrator or neighbor. It is the included middle: the unresolvable tension of the dialogic engagement. It's where all the games of life happen, the good and the bad, the enjoyable and the miserable. Frost has captured in a quite simple image and event a very rich vision of complexity, I think, but I suspect no one will be convinced if I do not provide details. Tomorrow.

Defining Boundaries

In a few weeks, I will deliver a presentation about boundaries to the Southern Humanities Conference convening this year in Savannah, GA. The conference topic, Boundaries: Real and Imagined, was chosen at last year's conference, and I have come to think about boundaries often this year as I have read deeper into complexity theory. It seems to me now that boundaries are much more than the lines (real or imagined) that separate things (real or imagined).

As I've thought about boundaries, I've come to realize that I have most often used the term to signify a line which divides one space, entity, or idea from other spaces, entities, and ideas, separating and distinguishing among them. I also use boundary to talk about the line that marks the outer limits or extension of a space, entity, or idea. (You can see these usages in my blog posts as early as 2007, 2008, and 2009 and then later in 2011 and 2012). All the stuff within the boundary belongs to and is identifiable as that space or entity. All the stuff outside the boundary belongs to some other space or entity. Boundaries, according to my old usage, are the boxes that hold and define a thing—inside the boundary is the thing, outside the boundary is everything else. This view, of course, involves me in the issues with definition that I've been struggling with in this blog, and to my mind, boundary—as I've been using it—is an aspect of our reductionist and essentialist habits of mind, especially mine.

Humph! And all this time I've been imagining myself a post-structuralist. Oh, well. Let's see if we can weed this bit of neo-fascism out of my heart. Or, more likely, weave it into my heart with a slightly different thread. Given the rhizomatic nature of thoughts, I have no hope of weeding any idea from my head or heart.

I think my usage of boundary began to trouble me as long ago as 2010 when I started referencing Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall as I struggled to understand Deleuze and Guattari's concept of asignifying ruptures and the rhizome. As I understand it, asignifying ruptures are those flights of deterritorializations and reterritorializations of entities that unhinge our neat little definitions of reality, which has a nasty habit of regularly escaping the little boxes (significations) that we try to put it into. As Frost famously says in his poem, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." That something is Reality, or the Rhizome. It doesn't like being boxed in, and I was delighted to find in Frost an early proponent of post-structuralism.

Or so I thought. I was forgetting the other repeated mantra in that poem: "Good fences make good neighbors." Hmm … something else there is, then, that does love a wall. But I argued with myself, clearly the poem, if not Frost himself, favors breaking down the walls that separate us, doesn't it? Near the end of the poem, after the narrator has stated his case against walls, he paints an uncomplimentary picture of his neighbor and his neighbor's point of view:

    … I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Isn't Frost suggesting that people who like clear, firm boundaries are stone-age simpletons who can't understand the value of tearing down the Walls, a firm value in this post-structural age and which I believe is the only point of agreement one can find between Pink Floyd and Ronald Reagan? Perhaps Forst is not so facile. I'll think about this more tomorrow.

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.