Forks in the Road/Nodes in the Web toward Digital Learning

I usually don’t see the fork in the road at the time I take it. It’s only looking back that I can say, “Huh. Made a choice there.” Or, occasionally, “Huh. Made a meaningful choice there.”

As 2008 slid into 2009, a recent addition to the rank of PhDs and already-long-time member of the adjunct-faculty class, I read a blog post–I suppose for me in that year it must have been a blog post, rather than a Tweet or a Facebook status update–by Dr. A.K.M. “Akma” Adam, recommending his readers’ attention to a then-recent digital-learning  video by Michael Wesch. It was “A Portal to Media Literacy” (2008), following upon Wesch’s “The Machine is Us/ing Us” (2007). Both presentations concern learning and the digitization of text, exploring how the hyperlink, especially with the help of RSS (allowing us to “feed” Web content from one place to another), allows information–once hard to find, tucked into nesting drawers of categories into single locations–to live in virtually infinite numbers of places at once. The task for learners is no longer to “find” information, but to cope with a world in which information has become ubiquitous. For example, learners can aggregate “feeds” of Web content that bears desired keywords or tags. “The Machine is Us/ing Us” also celebrates that learners are able, not only to navigate and aggregate Web content, but create it, contributing to and thereby becoming part of the “machine” and its ubiquity.

Digital Learning:  From Experiments to Opportunities

Experimenting with Wesch’s ideas and methods, I began to incorporate into my face-to-face courses substantive elements of online collaborative learner interaction, in particular by asking my learners to create their own blogs and wikis outside of our institutional learning management systems (“LMSes,” such as Blackboard or Moodle). Using RSS aggregation tools like Yahoo Pipes and aggregation sites like NetVibes, I would “feed” their blog posts and wiki contributions into a shared hub, usually a set of pages in our LMS. Later, their “distributed” activity would come to include the creation and annotation of socially-shared Web bookmarks (using sites like Diigo), and of course eventually Tweets and Twitter chats, all of this also aggregated into a shared course “hub” through the miracle of RSS.

My experiments led naturally into opportunities for online teaching and learning, and eventually also facilitating faculty professional development in the pedagogies taking shape around digitally-mediated learning. When I am not researching and teaching my academic subject matter (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament), I am engaged in the research and practices oriented toward questions like, “Why do we teach online courses? Why do learners enroll in them?” “How do I translate what I already know about good teaching into an online environment?” “What makes me confident that what I know about ‘good teaching’ is true?” “What is economically just (or unjust) about the way we’re teaching? About the ways we are considering teaching?” “What is learning, how do we know learning has happened, and how do we assess performances that demonstrate learning?” “How soon before I have to read another ‘Something-Something-Disruption’ or ‘Is X the Death of Y?’ opinion piece on higher education?”

To engage these questions, I collaborate with faculty colleagues, admins, and trustees concerning institutional vision and practices. I take certification programs in online teaching. And, I observe and participate in more informal online learning events, many of which are on a model that evokes my earliest brushes with digital learning. These include events like Mooc Mooc, ETMOOC, Rhizomatic Learning, and most recently, Connected Courses. In these courses, learners are helped to build their own platforms in which to create in response to course prompts. (At its most simple, this can just be a WordPress or Blogger blog, and maybe a Twitter account.) Learners made things, shared them, interacted concerning the things they had made, forming communities of inquiry and of mutual support. My pedagogical mind map began to be populated not only by areas marked with terms like “constructivism” and “play,” but by ill-defined regions like “maker movement,” “less yack, more hack,” “distributed learning,” and–increasingly–variants on “MOOC”: MOOCs, cMOOCs, xMOOCs, corporate MOOCs. My inquiries led me back to the neighborhood of that fork in the road, the one I hadn’t quite noticed while I was taking it.

Remember, I was talking about 2008.

Back in that same year of 2008, unknown to me at the time, the MOOC was born. That is to say: Dave Cormier, in an effort to describe a particular learning event created and facilitated by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, coined the term “MOOC,” or “massive open online course.” The learning event was “Connectivism and Connected Knowledge,” or “CCK08.” Students for this course included a small “core” group of University of Manitoba degree students, plus over 2000 learners participating in the course free of charge. As with many of these courses (Moocmooc, Rhizomatic Learning, Connected Courses), the course design was a conscious reflection of the subject matter. “Connectivism” describes an approach to learning which holds, as Stephen Downes says,

…that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks.

For these pioneers in distributed learning, what makes a course a “MOOC” is how it understands learning (some form of connectivism) and, relatedly, the way that it scales. While begun with a Web “hub,” the action of the course is the learners’ building of a traversible network. The intentional weakness of the center means that the action of the course is less about interactions between the learners and the hub, and more about the knowledge built among the nodes on the network. Or, using Dave Cormier’s rhizomatic metaphor (originating in Deleuze and Guattari’s The Thousand Plateaus), the course is about the unpredictable “lines of flight” that shoot out from the established network of roots.

If you are interested, take a look at some of what is happening these weeks at Connected Courses. See what Dave Cormier has to suggest about “Success in a MOOC.” Experiment with being a node in the Web; it may just be a fork in your road.

Photo credit: “Fork in the Road,” copyright Mick Malpass, licensed for reuse by CC BY-SA 2.0 license

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