Climate Change: Impacts and Responses
New Learning
e-Learning Ecologies Case Studies
Design Principles and Practices
Information, Medium, and Society
Karthik Krishnan
William Cope
Jason Berg.png "Rita van Haren")
Rita van Haren
Abc20 XyzReda Sadki’s Updates
The publicness of learning
I've been reading Jeff Jarvis's Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves How We Work and Live. It raises some interesting questions for educators.
Scholar is a private space, for example. As I understand it, publishing to the bookstore is the endpoint in a process, and sharing (publicness) is constrained to contribute to the process of peer review.
However, in the Digital Age, anyone can share anything. Expression, thinking, writing... it's all public unless we go out of our way to ensure that it's not. And even then, it probably is or can become public with the flip of a switch (think Facebook's privacy settings). Also, multimodal spaces like Wikipedia allow anyone to contribute.
Publicness can collapse elaborate schemes of authority. In the past, publishing was a costly activity reserved for experts through established and culturally-accepted means by which one acquired and had this expertise recognized. Those costs are now marginal enough that companies like Facebook or Tumblr will give anyone the means of public content production (in exchange, of course, for data mining into our private lives). Suddenly, having the means of production does not require you to be an expert.
I just read Professor Cope's comment where he explains that Scholar is a private social network, disconnected from Facebook and other networks of publicness, for legal reasons and because he believe there needs to be a separation for learning spaces from those where people engage in social interactions that does not have the explicit purpose of learning.
For example, with the learning theorist assignment, what woudl be the implications if part of the assignment was to edit the Wikipedia page for our thinker? In my case, I chose Robert Gagné, about whom I had previously read no more than three papers or articles. That certainly does not qualify me as an expert. I would claim that I learned quite a bit through the reading I then did to prepare the article. Did I learn anything that would make me a useful contributor to the Wikipedia page? Is it in the interest of learning for me to make public what I wrote -- whatever its quality -- so it ends up in the Google's search index and perhaps shows up for someone else looking for info about this learning theorist? My initial reaction is that my exploration and thinking about Gagné -- and the attempt to turn this into an article in Scholar -- had best remain private. But I get the feeling that Jarvis and other proponents of publicness might argue otherwise.
Lauren, my generation is most familiar with the logic you spell out in your first sentence: publish it if it's authoritative, credible, and contributes something. But the argument of Jarvis et al. is that in today's world 1) it is nearly impossible to control and constrain people (not just students) from publishing content anywhere, anytime (the affordance of ubiquity and 2) there are (or should be) tools (ie, machines) to sort the wheat from the chaff and to find the needle in the haystack. Because we can't rely on authors to self-identify or self-assess their level of authority, completeness, authority, etc. we need some sort of review process to achieve this. I agree that in educational institutions tools should be designed to ensure that this tagging of authority should be built-in.
Reda, there's already so much we have to teach students about how to distinguish credible sources - wouldn't it make our jobs so much easier if we either didn't make lightly researched work public, or make it public under a platform that clearly states that it's the work of a student. In class, we clearly tell students which papers are from their peers and which are at a level we hope they aspire to, even though both are worthy of consideration and emulation.
I love looking at some wiki spaces that are set up as the work of history students. I would definitely direct my students to those pages to see what others have done, as they are clearly published as the work of students, not experts. Students can even analyse what distinguishes the work of official wiki pages and those created by students. In short, as long as the authors of public information are clear about their credentials, I see no harm in making their work public, although it does give us a glut of info to wade through.
Maybe in the future, just as there is google scholar, and edu.tedtalks, there will be further distinctions in many shared platforms on the web.
Reda, I appreicate your thoughts about publicness. It seems like the challenge for teaching is reminding students about the benefits and consequences of public information. I posted recently about copyright and working with copyrighted text and images requires us to be intentional about our use. Certainly a lot of people don't pay attention and give proper attribution. However, learning to share information respectfully in a public information-sharing environment is important.
In a different vein, as educators, I think Professor Cope makes a good point that we have an important role in defining the relative publicness of our students' online spaces. I agree that having private spaces is useful, particularly because it creates a tighter community and increases students' accountability to each other. I've also appreciated Scholar's distinction between ongoing discussion (these update spaces) and the more formal discussion (the creator space). I think this helps us see how discussion informs production. Then as we evaluate, we also learn to evaluate other information on the internet.