H817 Block 2 Activity 13: The 'open' is a scary place.
Sunday, 3 Apr 2016, 08:41
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Monday, 4 Apr 2016, 19:52
Read one of the following:
•Mackness and Bell (2014), Rhizo14: A Rhizomatic Learning
cMOOC in Sunlight and in Shade.
•Stacey (2013), The pedagogy of MOOCs.
It was useful for me to Stacey (2013) because it gave a
historical overview very briefly that I found invaluable and one which helps
define Activity 14 a little better. It certainly helped me to develop my
knowledge of the innovations around assessment in higher education (HE) and to
help me contemplate why the resistance to significant change in education invariably
focuses around assessment, something I sense as strongly in H817 as elsewhere,
which sets up innovative ideas for assessment and then undermines them by
over-regulation (sourced probably externally to the course team). The menu of
assessment types, varied in modality of presentation and attached credit in
DS106 seems really interesting and full of potential for building in genuine
motivated group work and a balance of personalisation, which you will struggle
to find in any extant campus course, or indeed, as yet, the OU.
The drift of the argument in Stacey appears to be that MOOCs
are not ‘open’ by nature but can be designed to be more or less open (or indeed
relatively closed, ‘enclosing students in a closed environment that is locked
down and DRM’ed in a proprietary way’).
So very useful piece this, although the over plus of closure
in the repetitive metaphors of the bit I quoted shows it to lack the elegance
of Mackness & Bell (2015), which is an eye-opener in so many ways.
This paper has the capability to change where I am on H817
because suddenly and unashamedly it forefronts the values implicit in the practice
of online education and (p. 33 citing Noddings 1984) ‘the nurturance of the
ethical ideal’. That’s an ugly phrase (Nodding’s not theirs) but a beautiful
idea – which I haven’t heard since the 1960s – 70s.
I think I like it because it does not doubt the fact,
implicit in Stacey but less sensitively registered, that the tussle between
demands for closure and demands for openness in education (and assessment in
particular_ is a struggle between the desire to stabilise and embed standard
against the fact that all genuinely new learning is inevitably disruptive and
destabilising (p. 30).
One thing that comes across very strongly is that learning
is productive of strong emotion. The paper locates it in the differential
reactions to the ‘rhizome’ metaphor from Deleuze – that fungal substructure of
haphazard connectivity: ‘weeds’, ‘dirt’, ‘sh***’ ‘thug’, ‘damn’. The reaction
is not unlike Hamlet’s to the new destabilisations in the state of Denmark, his
family and his mother’s bed: ‘things rank and gross in nature possess it
merely.’
This means that innovation is problematic unless posed in an
ethical context. They even claim it must be a ‘caring’ context (p. 33). As they
point out, innovation by teachers or educationally innovative institutions
inevitably puts the student in the position of the ‘subject’ of a
socio-psychological experiment, something I sensed in the very first
blog I ever wrote )for H800), where just like respondents in this article (p.
33) I saw myself as one of Skinner’s lab rats.
In many ways the only change now as I face TMA03 – imposed group
work- is I now see myself as one of the packs of rats sometimes tested post
Skinner. No doubt much of this is my own over-neurotic fear, but Mackness and
Bell put their fingers on the need to explore ‘the ethical implications of
experimenting on learners’ (p. 31).
And the truth is that such experiments yield ambivalent
results that show again that the positive and negative, light and dark are
balanced across the ‘sampled’ populations and even within each participant, at
different points of the continuum between those poles.
Good critical writing like this does not plump for easy
answers – unlike Stacey who feels, and I have some sympathy, that we need
sometimes to ‘leap in the dark’ if we are not to stay locked in the prevailing present
with all its staleness and inequity. Mackness and Bell have really help me to
see that that the agenda of Kear et. al: (2010) for a primary ‘social presence’
on the web or a community is located in this very unease about change (p. 29).
However, that is a too simple solution, and not one that is in my view,
pedagogically sound (it just feels safer and warmer to the ideological
imagination). Ethical systems however are not simple minded – unless ground
down to over-rigid structures of command or prettified (in that very social class-bound
way) into ‘netiquette’ – they force us to base principles of what it means to
communicate: and that means, at least in part, to challenge each other. We need
to look again, without flinching, at what Rogers work on ‘encounter groups’
show us about how mutuality works in complex ways.
H817 Block 2 Activity 13: The 'open' is a scary place.
Read one of the following:
•Mackness and Bell (2014), Rhizo14: A Rhizomatic Learning cMOOC in Sunlight and in Shade.
•Stacey (2013), The pedagogy of MOOCs.
It was useful for me to Stacey (2013) because it gave a historical overview very briefly that I found invaluable and one which helps define Activity 14 a little better. It certainly helped me to develop my knowledge of the innovations around assessment in higher education (HE) and to help me contemplate why the resistance to significant change in education invariably focuses around assessment, something I sense as strongly in H817 as elsewhere, which sets up innovative ideas for assessment and then undermines them by over-regulation (sourced probably externally to the course team). The menu of assessment types, varied in modality of presentation and attached credit in DS106 seems really interesting and full of potential for building in genuine motivated group work and a balance of personalisation, which you will struggle to find in any extant campus course, or indeed, as yet, the OU.
The drift of the argument in Stacey appears to be that MOOCs are not ‘open’ by nature but can be designed to be more or less open (or indeed relatively closed, ‘enclosing students in a closed environment that is locked down and DRM’ed in a proprietary way’).
So very useful piece this, although the over plus of closure in the repetitive metaphors of the bit I quoted shows it to lack the elegance of Mackness & Bell (2015), which is an eye-opener in so many ways.
This paper has the capability to change where I am on H817 because suddenly and unashamedly it forefronts the values implicit in the practice of online education and (p. 33 citing Noddings 1984) ‘the nurturance of the ethical ideal’. That’s an ugly phrase (Nodding’s not theirs) but a beautiful idea – which I haven’t heard since the 1960s – 70s.
I think I like it because it does not doubt the fact, implicit in Stacey but less sensitively registered, that the tussle between demands for closure and demands for openness in education (and assessment in particular_ is a struggle between the desire to stabilise and embed standard against the fact that all genuinely new learning is inevitably disruptive and destabilising (p. 30).
One thing that comes across very strongly is that learning is productive of strong emotion. The paper locates it in the differential reactions to the ‘rhizome’ metaphor from Deleuze – that fungal substructure of haphazard connectivity: ‘weeds’, ‘dirt’, ‘sh***’ ‘thug’, ‘damn’. The reaction is not unlike Hamlet’s to the new destabilisations in the state of Denmark, his family and his mother’s bed: ‘things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.’
This means that innovation is problematic unless posed in an ethical context. They even claim it must be a ‘caring’ context (p. 33). As they point out, innovation by teachers or educationally innovative institutions inevitably puts the student in the position of the ‘subject’ of a socio-psychological experiment, something I sensed in the very first blog I ever wrote )for H800), where just like respondents in this article (p. 33) I saw myself as one of Skinner’s lab rats.
In many ways the only change now as I face TMA03 – imposed group work- is I now see myself as one of the packs of rats sometimes tested post Skinner. No doubt much of this is my own over-neurotic fear, but Mackness and Bell put their fingers on the need to explore ‘the ethical implications of experimenting on learners’ (p. 31).
And the truth is that such experiments yield ambivalent results that show again that the positive and negative, light and dark are balanced across the ‘sampled’ populations and even within each participant, at different points of the continuum between those poles.
Good critical writing like this does not plump for easy answers – unlike Stacey who feels, and I have some sympathy, that we need sometimes to ‘leap in the dark’ if we are not to stay locked in the prevailing present with all its staleness and inequity. Mackness and Bell have really help me to see that that the agenda of Kear et. al: (2010) for a primary ‘social presence’ on the web or a community is located in this very unease about change (p. 29). However, that is a too simple solution, and not one that is in my view, pedagogically sound (it just feels safer and warmer to the ideological imagination). Ethical systems however are not simple minded – unless ground down to over-rigid structures of command or prettified (in that very social class-bound way) into ‘netiquette’ – they force us to base principles of what it means to communicate: and that means, at least in part, to challenge each other. We need to look again, without flinching, at what Rogers work on ‘encounter groups’ show us about how mutuality works in complex ways.
All the best
Steve