The Rigors of Complexity

I read with some interest Arnold Dodge's recent Huffington Post called It's the Complexity, Stupid, though I wasn't so happy with the epithet. It's eye-catching, but I think it distracts us from complexity and reifies the very group of people he should be embracing. Mr. Dodge is a veteran of the New York public school system and currently the chair of the Department of Educational Leadership and Administration at Long Island University-Post, so he likely knows a few things about education, and perhaps a few things about complexity.

He starts his post by noting the failure of public education to service our young people so that they can be contributing members of society, lead a full and rewarding life, and understand that they are stewards of the next version of life on our planet. This failure, he says, is the greatest threat to our nation's security. That's a bold statement, and I have no idea if he's correct (a meteor strike or global warming seem a greater threats), but it's an engaging introduction. We like apocalyptic calls to action—they are simple, and this is where Mr. Dodge gets caught by the very drive for simplicity that he is attacking. And why are our schools failing? Again, he gives us a simple answer: because we prefer simplicity over complexity.

Yes, we do. Almost all of us. Fortunately, that does not make us all stupid. It makes us too left-brained, if Iain MacGilchrist is correct about the divided brain, which can leave us blind to some very useful information about the world, but it doesn't leave us stupid. But then stupid is a simple reification of all those people that Mr. Dodge wants to think differently. That seems a problem to me.

Reification is a nice concept that Mr. Dodge picks up from Stephen Jay Gould's 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man, a book I have not read, but it seems that reification, at least as Mr. Dodge is using it, is a kind of reductionism characteristic of the drive toward the simple. As Gould says we "give the word 'intelligence' to this wondrously complex and multifaceted set of human capabilities. This shorthand symbol is then reified and intelligence achieves its dubious status as a unitary thing." Like the word stupid, a simple shorthand symbol to reference a complex entity, but Mr. Dodge overlooks that most symbol systems, language certainly, have this tendency. The name Keith Hamon reifies the complex entity writing to you in this post. The term reification itself reifies a complex behavior and mental process.

Complexity demands that we vibrate, or dance if you like, between the statically reduced and reified on the one hand and the open-ended cosmic on the other. The reified is graspable and useable by the left brain, and the holistic is contemplated by the right brain. We need the simple for power to do and say things, and we need the holistic to make sense of what we do and say. Complexity is the tension and interaction between the two extremes: the simple on one hand and chaos on the other. MacGilchrist makes a strong argument, for me, that our current age is mentally unbalanced in favor of the left brain's drive for simplicity. This explains much of what I see from religious fundamentalism to scientific, technological, political, and business fundamentalism. This is unfortunate, but who cannot have a certain sympathy for those who prefer the simple over the chaotic? Most of us spend much of our time and energy trying to build simplicity into our lives: schedules, relationships, reliable incomes, maps, routines, and more. As Iran just proved to us again, we prefer the simplicity of an awful dictator to chaos. But just as both China and the Soviet Union have also proved, too much rigid simplicity does not lead to a satisfactory society for most people. We want something that oscillates between the simple and the chaotic.

I am not suggesting here some Golden Mean or dialectic; rather, I am suggesting a dialogic in the sense of Edgar Morin and Iain MacGilchrist. In his book The Master and the Emissary, MacGilchrist says that the left and right hemispheres of our brains provide antagonistic visions of the world, and our mental state is a dynamic unfolding of the tensions and interactions between the two visions. Morin says in more universal language that the 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." There is a dialogic, too, between the Mr. Dodge's simple and the chaotic, and this dialogic is necessary for life. We can reify this zone of engagement and call it complexity.

At times, we favor the simple, at other times, the chaotic, and all of us know people who favor too much simplicity or too much chaos. Our lives are an unfolding of the tensions and interactions between the simple and the chaotic, and it may seem that this complex zone is the right place to be, but that isn't quite right. It is not a place to be; rather, it is a place of becoming that exists only as a dialog, or a dance, between the simple and the chaotic. I am not talking about a balance here, but a suspension—a not altogether happy suspension. We must be diligent and vigilant to maintain this dialog, and most of us do not have that kind of sustained energy. Thus, we lapse into the simple or the chaotic when our energies fail us. Some of us just stay there, and I can understand why.

Well, that turned into a real Sunday School lesson, didn't it?

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.

Flexible Disciplines, Flexible Boundaries, and Making Meaning

I think I have a bit more to say about boundaries, especially in terms of the boundaries that distinguish the academic disciplines. I've been arguing that the boundaries between, say, history and physics are nowhere near as rigid and as static as academic purists might insist, but neither are the boundaries between history and physics imaginary, capricious, and unnecessary as academic anarchists might insist. (I recognize that I am creating extremes with my contrast of purists and anarchists and that most educationists lie somewhere between or even outside these two extremes, but it helps me to see my point.) Boundaries are both necessary for human activity and knowledge and temporary.

I rely here on a few articles by South African complexity scholar Paul Cilliers and by Dave Snowden's Cynefin Framework, and my argument, I think, makes a basic assumption: that education and educational structures are complex systems tending to the chaotic, rather than complicated systems tending to the simple. I believe this is so despite the enormous energy expended in wrenching education into a simple system. Education ain't simple. It probably isn't even complicated. It's complex, at best. To my mind, then, the biggest problem with academic disciplines is that we try to move them into the simple and/or complicated domains of the Cynefin Framework where their boundaries are fixed, explicit, and easily taught, with clear canons of content and methodologies. In the simple or even complicated domains, it's easy to distinguish the historian from the physicist. In the complex domain, disciplinary and canonical boundaries are much more problematic, though no less useful, even necessary. Paul Cilliers helps me understand this.

In several critiques (Knowledge, Complexity, and Understanding (2000), Knowledge, limits and boundaries (2005), and Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely (2007), for instance), Cilliers argues that knowledge is best understood as an emergent property "constituted within a complex system of interactions". This view of knowledge avoids both extremes of the purist and the anarchist, or as Cilliers more accurately calls them: the fundamentalist and the relativist. As Cilliers says:

An understanding of knowledge as constituted within a complex system of interactions would, on the one hand, deny that knowledge can be seen as atomised ‘facts’ that have objective meaning. Knowledge comes to be in a dynamic network of interactions, a network that does not have distinctive borders. On the other hand, this perspective would also deny that knowledge is something purely subjective, mainly because one cannot conceive of the subject as something prior to the ‘network of knowledge’, but rather as something constituted within that network. The argument from complexity thus wants to move beyond the objective/subjective dichotomy. (Knowledge, limits and boundaries, p. 608)

Knowledge, then, is not representational, "linked to the sign which represents it", but relational, "the result of a dynamic interaction between all the meaningful components in the system … itself a complex process" (Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely, p. 85). This presents an immediate problem, however, given the open nature of complex systems. If complete knowledge must account for an infinite number of interactions across the open boundaries of complex systems, then how do we ever attain actionable knowledge, given that we have a limited amount of time? Because we, as knowledge makers, are ourselves contextualized, and each context limits the number of system components presented for knowledge making. In other words, though a single rose is ultimately connected through its complex interactions to the entire rest of the Universe, the meaning of the rose is constrained when I cut it from my own garden and present it to my wife on Valentine's Day, which provides a bounded context within which meaning can emerge. The boundaries make the emergence of a particular meaning possible.

Of course, the meaning is no more absolute than the boundaries that enable it. In the relatively straightforward example above, the meaning of the rose will be slightly different, perhaps radically different, for me than for my wife as we bring our different contexts to the event, but it will be similar enough that we can at least speak meaningfully with each other—though we should be mindful that the very stuff of most romantic comedies involves the different meanings drawn by men and women from even so well-bounded and commonly shared an event as Valentine's Day. Boundaries in complex systems are not permanent or rigid, though they can persist in recognizable contours for long times.

So to directly address my concerns with Marion Brady's dismissal of disciplinary boundaries, I think he slightly overstates his case. We cannot dispense with boundaries in complex systems such as academic disciplines if we want to create meaning, or knowledge. Likewise, we cannot calcify our boundaries without destroying knowledge. As Cilliers says it:

One can, and often should, emphasise the interrelatedness of systems. Often the boundaries of systems are constructions we impose in order to reduce the complexity. This can lead to oversimplifications, to reductive descriptions of the system. However, if boundaries become too vague, we end up with a kind of holism which does not allow much to be said. … We need limits in order to say something. (Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely, p. 88)

Perhaps, though, Brady's discontent with disciplinary boundaries comes from the usual interpretation of boundaries as "something that separates one thing from another" (Knowledge, limits and boundaries, p. 611). In this view of boundaries, one cannot be both an historian and a physicist at the same time. History and physics are separate things, and one cannot be in both places at once. Of course, complexity and quantum theories ignore this kind of classical logic. Cilliers makes some suggestions about how we might think differently about boundaries, ways that make sense within complex systems.

First, "we should rather think of a boundary as something that constitutes that which is bounded. This shift will help us to see the boundary as something enabling, rather than as confining" (p. 611). From this view, our skins, those well-known and most familiar boundaries, don't separate us from the rest of the world; rather, they enable our interaction with the world by helping to maintain our own integrity as a persisting complex system and providing somewhat stable and recognizable contours that the rest of the world can engage and through which energy and information may be exchanged. Likewise, disciplinary boundaries need not separate historians from physicists, but they should enable useful, valuable interaction between historians and physicists, shifting and stretching as different issues supply different contexts of meaning, again enabling a mutually valuable exchange of energy and information.

Next, we should rethink our physical images about the place of a boundary. We must replace our visual metaphors which force us to think of complex systems "as something contiguous in space." Complex social systems, Cilliers notes, are not necessarily contiguous; thus, "parts of the system may exist in totally different spatial locations." This is certainly the case with history as an academic discipline, which is not a spatially contiguous physical system. This implies that a historian likely belongs to many different complex systems (families, churches, political parties, etc) and "that different systems interpenetrate each other, that they share internal organs." So where's the boundary? It's always provisional, determined by the context referenced at any given time for any given event. Furthermore, Cilliers notes that any node in a system is "never far away from the boundary. If the components of the system are richly interconnected, there will always be a short route from any component to the 'outside' of the system. … the boundary is folded in, or perhaps, the system consists of boundaries only. Everything is always interacting and interfacing with others and with the environment; the notions of 'inside' and 'outside' are never simple and uncontested" (p. 611).

So maybe that can address Brady's concerns with disciplinary boundaries. At least somewhat.

cMOOCs & Temporary, Emergent Boundaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MOOCs, Transdisciplinarity, and Thinking Big

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MOOCs and One-on-One Teaching

Ahh … home!

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

Mr. Kolowich starts his article by saying:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Unconscious Reality

The second slippery aspect of the question do we know all of Reality refers to how we conceive knowledge. If knowledge is something conscious and mostly intellectual, then I don't think we can know all of Reality, or even much of Reality. In other words, we have experiences of the Real that we are not conscious of and can hardly represent in any language. We engage and know many things with our minds and bodies long before we become conscious of them, if we ever become conscious. For instance, if you breathe in an unhealthy swarm of influenza virus, your immune system will know it and begin mobilizing a defense long before you are conscious of the infection. Or ask a gifted soccer player how he knows where the ball will be two touches before it arrives, and he likely cannot tell you, but he knows to be at that spot on the pitch anyway. Intimations of things long before we are conscious of them are a common experience in life.

We all know this, but we educators often behave as if we don't. We assume that, and behave as if, knowledge is strictly referential, based solely on our representations, descriptions, images, or mathematical formulations, to use Nicolescu's list. Knowledge is something we can put on the test next Tuesday. It isn't (you'll get a much better discussion of the issues with representational views of knowledge from Stephen Downes' blog Half an Hour). Knowledge extends beyond conscious knowledge.

But is this extended view of knowledge useful to education? I think it is extremely useful for those who envision education as a complex process of traversing networks—not as a walk to be taken (traced), but as a walking (mapping). I'm playing here with ideas that I've gleaned from Morin and Deleuze and Guattari.  Morin's concept of interdisciplinary research suggests that the path to knowledge is not followed, it is forged. He amplifies this idea with a line I've often quoted in this blog: we must learn to define from the inside out, not from the outside in. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that engagement of the rhizome, the Real, is a process of mapping structures and pathways, not tracing given structures and pathways. To my mind, these ideas position the Knower at the center of the zone of engagement as a knowmad who chooses to engage some aspect of the rhizome. Or not.

This tack positions me with the knowmad and suggests questions about what prompts a knowmad to engage or disengage some aspect of the rhizome. This reverses the usual pedagogical question of how to motivate students, as if motivation is a trigger we can pull, a response we can stimulate. I'm not sure it is. What then prompts a student to engage a teacher, a given curriculum, and a class? Where does this come from? And is there anything a teacher can do to facilitate that engagement?

Let's ask from the knowmad's point of view: why would a twenty-year-old studying to be a physical therapist want to engage a sixty-year-old in a course about writing? Why would they want to avoid such an engagement? In his book The Art of Changing the Brain (2002), James Zull says that most students unconsciously decide within the first 30 seconds of entering a class whether or not they will like it. Or like me. I probably know within the first 30 seconds whether or not I will like a particular class. These largely emotional engagements with the Real set the parameters of the Reality of the class, and they are difficult to change, in large part because we never quite make them conscious, or explicit. We just have a feeling that some classes work and some don't. However, some very heavy, precise neurological sensing and cognitive processing has gone on underneath the conscious surface to cause this particular Reality to emerge in the zone of engagement I and my students call Composition 1. Peering into the collective unconscious of the class to determine why a class is not working is more work than most of us care to take on, but it is extremely important for the success of the class.

There are plenty more questions to ask from the view of the knowmad: does this twenty-year-old have any sense of where I want to take them in the class? And do they want to go there? Do they have any hope of success? Any desire for success? Does this connect in any way with the path they are already on, or is this a side-trek they had just as soon avoid? And mostly: do they really want to connect to this sixty-year-old, short, white guy with his corny jokes told in a slightly southern accent?

The willingness to engage always comes from the knowmad themselves. The knowmad must see some path worth traversing, because mapping the rhizome is hard work. And it is the rare knowmad, especially young knowmads, who know why they want to engage or not. Much of our willingness to engage or not with a particular aspect of the rhizome, the Real, is decided prior to or completely outside of consciousness. As educators, we overlook this unconscious aspect of reality at our peril.