Ethics for MOOCs: Power in Rhizo-MOOCs

Maha Bali just published a post Power that Remains When We Leave the Classroom that talks about the results of pulling the teacher and, thus, the teacher's power from the classroom. She notes that this does not leave an absence of power and a group of equals. To my mind, this still leaves power that is now up for grabs whether or not the students have a "sense of community and trust". The group has power, even if it doesn't know what to do with it.

I have written about power in this blog before, but not within the context of ethics. So I want to do that today. I also want to provide a more nuanced response to Dave Cormier's #rhizo15 challenge question: is rhizomatic learning an invasive species? Dave characterizes community learning in terms of aggressive power:

Rhizomatic plants are chaotic, aggressive and resilient. It models some of the qualities that can make a good learner. The rhizome, however, can also be an invasive species. It can choke other plants out of your garden such that only the rhizomatic plant remains.

He is suggesting, of course, that rhizomatic learning is an aggressive process that drowns out other processes, crowding them out of open learning spaces with their incessant posting and tweeting. Sounds like an unwelcome exercise of power to me. Is this so? I don't think so (hence, my short response in my previous post), but now I want to explore why.

Several years ago I read John Henry Clippinger's book A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity (2007), and I recall an argument he makes that freedom is best understood as freedom to rather than freedom from. These prepositions and the directions they take are important.

For me, the argument goes something like this: We humans exist always within social and natural networks, these networks create power, and thus, we are always within networks of power. Freedom from power, then, is not possible. Freedom from a given power may not even be possible, though we can insulate ourselves somewhat. For example, I can insulate myself from this year's flu, but even if I don't catch the disease, I am still affected by the power of this disease by forced changes in habits and associations and the illness of friends and family. During the Cold War, I was insulated somewhat from the power of communist dictatorships, but I was still not totally immune—I can recall even now the suffocating fear of imminent nuclear holocaust. That is power.

Of course, the flu and nation states are very large power regimes, much bigger than MOOCs, and I use them to highlight my point. However, all actors at all scales are entangled in power, and I define power as the struggle of a system to develop and maintain its own identity and to exchange matter, energy, information, and organization within the context of other systems trying to do the same. I imagine the difference between the power effects of a nation state and those of my own immune system as the difference between dropping a huge boulder in the water and dropping a pebble. The boulder causes bigger ripples that extend further, but the pebble causes ripples as well. Power ripples through all our different ponds, lakes, and oceans. We emerge physically and socially through rippling power. We swim in it. (I do not know if the ripples cause power or power causes ripples. Perhaps ripples are only the obvious manifestations of power, but that's another post.)

Freedom from power, then, is not an option, and disengagement from a system and its power offers at best some insulation, some distance, perhaps to the degree that you can ignore the power. I insist, however, that you are never really free from any source of power given the entanglement of all within all. Ripples run all the way across the lake, but eventually, they don't rock our boats.

The only real option then is freedom to power, especially in social networks. In other words, we exercise our freedom when we engage the power of the group. We are free when we both can and do engage the power of the group. Freedom is not a negative—an absence of power—it is a positive—an exercise of power.

We can exercise our power, our freedom, in two ways: by engaging and by disengaging. We can stay and play or we can walk away. But keep in mind that walking away is not negative as we are always walking into some other power system. As Timothy Morton has explained quite nicely in his book HyperObjects (2014), there is no away, no space outside of a system and its systemic power. Moreover, we always walk away carrying the stain of whatever we are leaving. There is no away, only a fading influence that we eventually come to ignore if we work at it hard enough (though that very working can sometimes only remind us of what we are working to forget. Damn!).

RhizoMoocs are systems, and like all systems, a given rhizoMOOC generates power, or rather, power emerges as the system tries to form itself and as it exchanges matter, energy, information, and organization with its ecosystem. I have participated in few events that are more open, with more evenly distributed power than rhizoMOOCs. (In 1970, I did attend the Second Atlanta Pop Festival for 3 days of "peace, love, and music", and it may have been a bit more open, but not much.)

In open, self organizing systems with freedom to move—to engage or disengage—knots form. In our bodies, we call these knots organs: stomach, heart, lungs and so on. Such knots form in social systems as well, almost inevitably. We call them cliques, companies, and countries. We preserve freedom in social systems by allowing movement from system to system, knot to knot. RhizoMOOCs preserve this freedom.

For instance, in all the RhizoMOOCs I've participated in a knot has formed around Twitter, as participants congregate there and engage one another. Inevitably, a few people tweet more and more engagingly than do others, and as these prolific tweeters gain more connections, they gain more power. Actually, they don't gain power like a possession. A better way to say this is that because of the number of connections to the prolific tweeters, their words and actions are amplified (power) and perturb the system more than the words and actions of other, less well connected actors. In our current #rhizo15, for instance, both Maha Bali and I use Twitter, but Maha tweets far more than I do with far more connections. Thus, she manifests in #rhizo15 more Twitter power than I do. Maha starts movements along Twitter and perturbs the #rhizo15 system. The following short video shows how such knots can form in open spaces such as a rhizoMOOC or an outdoor music festival. Give a look:



Is this sort of self-organizing knot a problem? Does it threaten the music festival?

It can be a problem if, for instance, the concert organizers try to limit dancing or to limit the number of people who can dance, forcing everyone to sit still and listen to the music. This might seem far-fetched, but we do this in traditional classrooms all the time: limiting conversation to one channel and one content, both belonging to the teacher. Self-organizing knots can also be a problem if the dancing becomes so dominant that no one else can hear the concert. Such things have happened on the Net. DOS attacks are common examples.

But this kind of knot is not a problem first if its boundaries are open, if you are free to engage or not engage. Lots of people freely join the dancing guys, but more do not. This is freedom. You can join, but you don't have to. Note that, even though the dancing guy and his second and third mates attract lots of followers, most people in the crowd do not join. They lurk instead, watching from the sidelines, or they remain focused on the stage act. It is possible that some in the crowd were annoyed at the dancing mob and would have supported the police moving in and breaking up the mayhem, but they show a profound misunderstanding of open spaces, and they are too easily annoyed.

Then, self-organizing knots are not a problem if you can form your own knot. The best response if you don't like the Twitter dance is to join another dance or start your own dance. In #rhizo15, you can write a song with Kevin Hodgson, a story with Terry Elliot, a play with Tania Shelko, a poem sequence with Simon Ensor, maps and graphs with Daniel Lynds, or blog posts with Autumm Caines. Nothing in an open space precludes you changing the topic. You are free to engage the power. You are not free to expect an absence of power. It takes power to do all those things, and I am pleased that so many want to do so much. God bless the rhizome.

If Maha is brave enough to start dancing in Twitter, and if one or two others join her, then a knot can form in #rhizo15. As it grows and exerts power, this knot of activity can annoy and intimidate others, especially those who brought their lawn chairs and picnic baskets and have rather strict ideas about decorum at a rock concert, as is beginning to happen in the grey zones at Rolling Stones' concerts (it's a main reason for the very expensive seats: to separate those who no longer dance and drink only wine from those who dance too freely under the influence of other spirits). But Maha is not the problem here. She is behaving ethically and correctly in a rhizomatic learning space.

So what are the ethics? What is appropriate behavior in an open, rhizomatic learning space?

• Expect power to emerge and cluster just as it did in galaxies.
• Exercise your right to engage in that power and to emerge with it.
• Shape the power, and be shaped by it.
• If it isn't working for you, shift to some other galaxy.
• Don't expect to ever leave the power totally behind. You've been stained.

Anarchy as Freedom To

I found myself perplexed about the use of the word power in Wednesday's (2015.02.11) #moocmooc Twitter chat, especially by the implication that anarchy is defined primarily by resistance to power and, hopefully, freedom from power. I appreciate Nick Kearney(@nickkearney) pointing out that anarchy as a word starts from a rejection of rulers (though my dictionary says that the word comes from the Greek anarkhos, from an- ‘without’ + arkhos ‘chief, ruler’, so without a ruler, which is not quite the same thing), but either way I have to define power too narrowly to make that concept of anarchy work. I prefer not to define anarchy as freedom from but as freedom to. These prepositions and the directions they imply are important, I think.

My first problem is that I don't think freedom from power is possible, as I define power most broadly as the forces that bind the world together, making life and everything else possible. It takes power at all scales (strings to galaxies) for anything to emerge and to act within a Universe with its own powers to emerge and act. Almost none of the power in the Universe is discretionary—that is, it can't be switched off. It exists, and we exist because of it and through interaction with it.

I know full well that when people speak of power they usually mean human social power in all its political, economic, educational, familial, and religious manifestations. I suppose that it makes sense in many discussions to distinguish natural forces from human powers, but something about this troubles me: when does natural force become human power? or to ask it more precisely: when does natural force cease and human power emerge? Is this a sliding scale with blind natural forces at one end and human powers at the other? Perhaps, but I balk at privileging the human this way and even more at differentiating the human too much from the natural.

Perhaps power is an emergent property that comes with agency and consciousness, when we can choose to act or not, but I'm not so fond of this either as it suggests that most of the Universe for most of the time lacked and still lacks agency, just blindly, stupidly clumping until some random, fortuitous magic happens and self-replicating clumps emerge, leading eventually to creatures with agency and consciousness. This view reduces reality to interactions of matter and energy, leaving out information and organization, which I think have been there all along. So I suspect agency and consciousness, like power, from the beginning. Power, not just dumb forces, from the beginning and through everything.

Still, the MOOCMOOC chat was about power in education, a very human enterprise, so I'll try to stick to that. For me, education requires power. For instance, it took great power (electrical, material, organizational, informational, intellectual, and more) for us to gather on Twitter Wednesday to discuss how to avoid power. The flows of power through that one conversation are truly staggering. We had to assemble a dizzying array of international organizations starting with the Internet, but including dozens of software, hardware, and transport multinationals, each a nexus of streams of power (I relied mostly on Apple, the richest company ever with a well-earned reputation for amassing and enforcing its power). And don't overlook the power of English—currently making as huge a power grab as humanity has ever witnessed—as our Twitter conversation likely would not have taken place without the affordances of that particular power stream. The college and university buildings and our houses or coffee shops that housed us as we chatted are all configurations of power. Sugars ran the streams of my veins and fed my neurons with power so that I could think and move my fingers and converse. I simply don't know how to think about education—or anything else—free from power. For me, power is implicated in every educational effort at every scale.

So if it isn't power in general that we complain about, what particular kind of power is it that we want to avoid? It's a bit too glib to say we complain about any power that we just don't like, but that isn't such a bad place to begin thinking about this. Let's start with the obvious: we don't like power which injures or destroys us or our groups, though the psychological and medical literature is full of exceptions to this generalization. We especially don't like those harmful powers that we think are intentional. Injury in a hunting accident is bad enough, but injury from an intentional shooting is worse. The first injury can be mitigated somewhat, the other cannot and is likely exacerbated.

Next, we don't like power that constrains us, even without injuring us. I generally don't like anything that prevents me from doing whatever I want to do, but I especially don't like those things which intentionally and regularly prevent me from doing what I want to do. My current school falls into this category.

Finally, we don't like power that moves us, even without injuring us, in directions and into spaces (physical, virtual, and mental) that we don't want to go. I generally don't like groups that expect me to participate in their activities for no reason other than my proximity. I don't like those things which intentionally and regularly make me do what I don't want to do. My current school falls into this category as well.

There are probably other kinds of power we don't like, but this should be sufficient for this discussion. We don't like power that stops or constrains our own desired flow of power, but we are least offended by power that flows from totally random acts of chance, more so by power that flows from good intentions, even more by power of carelessness and ignorance, and finally most by the power of foul intentions. As we perceive outside power impinging more on our own power flows, to the point of overwhelming our own power, and as we perceive the exercise of that power as more intentionally harmful, then we object more to that power. That power is more oppressive.

But we don't all find the same power oppressive. While most of us in the Twitter chat enjoyed the power flows opened by the technology and the conversation, some of us—including me—found the 140 character limit to be an oppressive exercise of power. That's the way most things are for me: a mix of power flows that enable and oppress, and I find it most difficult to separate the flows. All human engagements are complex flows of power and desire—some enabling, some oppressive—like different streams feeding into the flow of a river. Separating those streams of power is difficult once you're in the river, especially a really big river such as a nation, a business, or a university.

Moreover, what I find oppressive (140-character limit), others may find liberating. Or I myself may find the 140-character limit oppressive sometimes and liberating at others. How do I sort this bad power from good power? And what do I do with it after I've sorted it?

Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and his Emissary (2009) and Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desire, especially in Anti-Oedipus (1977) help me think about power. From D&G I take the notion that all human engagements, from the most intimate to the most world-wide, result from the desire to connect, to couple, with others to create something new: new pair-bonds and babies to new schools, businesses, and nations, or new MOOCs such as #moocmooc15. These desires—themselves complex flows of often conflicting drives—depend on material, energy, informational, and organizational power to explore an environment and to connect.

It so happens, though, that this flow of desire is not mine alone. As D&G note even those desires that I think of as mine are really flowing through me, coming from beyond me and eventually going on beyond me. My desires are mine more in the sense that a wave belongs to a surfer, or in the sense that my breath belongs to me. The breathing is mine, the breath is not. The desiring is mine, the desire is not. The desire, like the air, comes to me already scented by my environment. I add my own scent, my own desiring, but the stream is not mine alone.

My desiring is not alone, either. Others are desiring as well—sometimes a great many others—and the force of their desiring can overwhelm me, turning my desires back upon themselves and diverting them, perverting them. For instance, I can desire certain activities, directions, and results in #moocmooc15, but others have their own desires, the weight and force of which can frustrate me, leading me to act out or to disengage. I'm much more likely to act out if I cannot disengage. These things happen all the time.

Let's make this concrete. I find MOOCs such as #moocmooc15 and #rhizo14 free spaces mostly because I am free to engage and free to disengage, but once I engage, I cannot ignore the group's power. When engaged with a group, even if merely lurking, I cannot avoid exchanging energy, matter, information, and organization with the group. The group has weight, power. I am stained by the group. Of course, I stain the group in turn, but in terms of gravity, the group outweighs me.

Unless, of course, I have some other power, and this is perhaps what people resent most when they complain about power. Let's say I was Paulo Freire come back from the dead. I could probably sway #moocmooc15 and turn the discussion all by my miraculous self. Or if I was Bill Gates with a billion dollar grant to standardize MOOCs, then I might sway #moocmooc15 again. Or if I was the NSA and decided that MOOCs are subversive and a danger to national security, then again I might turn, even silence, the discussion (I think the billion dollars from Gates is the more unlikely exercise of power here, though the Freire resurrection might be pushing it). I don't know that I as a #moocmooc15 participant could really resist the various powers of Freire, Gates, or the NSA, though in the Romantic novel I'm writing about myself, I do.

Really, I can't even resist the power of #moocmooc15. I've just spent hours writing this post as part of my engagement. Is anarchy, then, my freedom to engage or to walk away? Ursula K. Le Guin seems to suggest as much in Omelas, though she doesn't seem to happy about it.

Well, you've probably noticed that I've not reached closure here. I'm not even sure what clarity I've achieved, but it was fun thinking about it.

The Question of Power and Technology in Online Spaces

Since the official end of Rhizo14, I've been spending much of my time grading papers and reading the precipitate from the cMOOC thunderstorm. The #rhizo14 garden is growing, meandering, carving new channels for itself—yes, mixing metaphors with wild abandon, and it is amazing to watch this happen. I live in south Florida, and in the hot afternoons, I can look westward toward the Everglades to see the huge white clouds boil up from the fecund rhizome of sawgrass, black water, and alligator to explode into the blue sky. Rhizo14 is exploding like that. What fun to watch, and even more fun to be part of.

Others see the explosion, too. Today I came across a New York Times editorial by David Brooks, The Leaderless Doctrine, which struck me as a fairly accurate description of the kind of shift that I see in cMOOCs and other online events. In his editorial, Brooks describes "a remarkable shift in how Americans see the world and their own country’s role in the world. For the first time in half a century, a majority of Americans say that the U.S. should be less engaged in world affairs." Brooks references a recent PewResearchCenter study which shows that this attitude is not traditional isolationism, at least not among Millennials, who actually want the U.S. to become more integrated with the world. Rather, the Millennials have lost faith in the power of big organizations to meaningfully address the world's issues: "Americans have lost faith in the high politics of global affairs. They have lost faith in the idea that American political and military institutions can do much to shape the world." Millennials have replaced faith in big government and big military with an "enormous confidence in personalized peer-to-peer efforts to promote democracy, human rights and development." Or to promote education, I might add. Brooks then suggests that a new liberal order is emerging in the U.S. that "is not a single system organized and defended by American military strength; it’s a spontaneous network of direct people-to-people contacts, flowing along the arteries of the Internet."

It sounds like one, gigantic MOOC to me, and it changes the rules of the game. Brooks adds that for the interconnected Millennials (I would use the term rhizomatic Millennials here) "the real power in the world is not military or political. It is the power of individuals to withdraw their consent. In an age of global markets and global media, the power of the state and the [military] tank, it is thought, can pale before the power of the swarms of individuals."

I don't think David Brooks is happy about this shift, but he is too much of a realist, I suppose, to insist that it isn't happening or that it isn't important. I think Brooks fears that this shift in how the Millennials envision and construct power will be a game changer. I hope it will be a game changer. I'm betting on it.

And this brings me to my real topic: power on the Internet, power in open and striated spaces, to use the terms of Deleuze and Guattari and Sîan Bayne (thanks to Frances Bell for this reference). The topic of power came up several times in Rhizo14, and I don't think I had a very good handle on it. I'm left wondering if there is something about online spaces that changes power: reduces it or enhances it, redistributes it. I suppose ultimately I want to know if we are ready to handle online power, if in fact there is any power to handle, and if the technology changes the mix.

In his editorial, Brooks seems to assume that power is an unavoidable element of human interactions, certainly geopolitical interactions, and I think I agree with him, mostly because I define humans as complex systems that must interact with enclosed and enclosing systems. We humans must exchange matter, energy, information, and organization with our enclosing systems (physical, social, economic, religious, governmental, etc.) just as our livers must exchange matter, energy, information, and organization within our own bodies. We don't have to exchange everything that we like to exchange, but we do have to exchange many things (air, water, bacteria, and food, come immediately to mind). I suppose we don't actually have to exchange language and culture, but if we didn't, then we would not be human in any sense applicable to my conversation here, so I'll ignore that rare case.

These exchanges involve us in power relationships, and I don't see how to avoid that. If I am to eat (exchange matter and energy with my ecosystem), then I must exert power (or my mother exerted that power on my behalf) to procure and eat food. The act of living engages me in a circular relationship within my surround: I take from it, and it takes from me. To exist at all, I need to develop and exercise the power necessary to exchange food that sustains me and to avoid food that can harm me. This is not trivial; rather, it is profound—far more significant for a happy life than anything I teach in my writing and literature classes. It is the most important learning.

So for me, all education is imbricated with power. Basically, we learn what to put in our mouths, what not to, and when, where, how, and why. It starts at birth, if not before, and it continues until we die, and it always involves learning to develop and to manage our own powers and to interact elegantly and productively with the power of others. Power, then, is relational (a concept I probably picked up from Frances Bell) even if we are thinking of our own, internal powers. It's easy to think of relations with other people and things, but we like to think of ourselves as a single entity, a unit or individual; however, to my mind, we are just one more complex system: a network of subsystems that share an arc of identity, a sense of shared experience, and tend to work together—though I think we are all aware of times when our minds/bodies seem to work against us, revealing the seams in the whole. (Damn, that's a long sentence. If I were grading this, I'd suggest a rewrite.)

Still, when we use the term power, especially in conversations about human relationships, perhaps most of us share Frances Bell's negative sense of the word. In her post Dimensions of power, knowledge and rhizomatic thinking, Bell writes, "My first thought when I hear the word power is of an individual exerting power over another – getting them to do something or stop doing something (possibly by raising a physical or verbal fist)." But if I think of power as the ability to stop or to cause changes in my ecosystem, then power is everywhere and in every relationship, and my task is to use this power as best I can.

Of course, the devil is in the definition of as best I can. For some, that might mean pushing as many other kids out of the sandbox as possible. For others, that might mean sucking up to, or ignoring, or hugging as many kids as possible. The point is: we have an incredible range of relations with others, all of which embody some distribution of and exercise of power. This power is unavoidable. If your mate walks into the room and refuses to speak to you or look you in the eye, you better be aware that some power play is on. A hug is as much an expression of power as a hit, and they are both relational.

So if power is integral to relationships, are relationships changed by technology? I think that's the question I'm trying to address. Okay, now that I have a question, I can start writing. Tomorrow.