Nate Angell

Wandering IQ. Raised by wolves. Friend to cheese. Working to bend the arc of justice.

Opening Nouns & Verbs

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Shadow of a "Now Open" sign hanging in a window cast in reverse on a dark sidewalk.
DSC_3372 by Matt Law licensed CC BY-NC-ND.

The open education community I run with is filled with the kind of people who think words really matter. For a while now we’ve been debating what to call the things we care about and do: open practices, open resources, open pedagogy, open licensing, open this, open that. Our debate is hot enough to make some people turn away and others dig in. But when words matter this much it signals real tensions in beliefs, priorities, territories and relationships.

A while back, David Wiley staked out a new term: “OER-enabled pedagogy”, motivated by what he saw as a lack of specificity in existing terms like “open pedagogy” to generate a new, “empty” label for what he called “the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical when you have permission to engage in the 5R activities”. In her post today, “How Little People Can Be Invisible in the Open”, Maha Bali brought our attention to how the story of David’s new term has spread, leaving out some of the people who played roles in its development and eclipsing other stories, terms, and definitions. To help set the record straight, David has now posted a short history of “OER-enabled pedagogy”, emphasizing contributions from Maha and others. David is clear he’s not himself trying to take sole credit for anything, as he says in one of his other posts in this history: “All of the activities that we associate with knowledge creation and other forms of scholarship are remix activities. They involve standing on the shoulders of giants, whether remixing existing knowledge in novel ways or combining previous understanding with genuinely new insight. Everything is a remix on one level or another.”

I learned that remix lesson as much with David as with anyone, like that time when our conversation led us from the idea of “disposable assessments” to start calling their opposite “renewable assessments” (though I prefer to call them “assignments” to get even farther away from education’s obsession with assessment).

And now I’m writing too. Why such a tempest in our terminological teapot? After all, we have a strong set of shared beliefs in this community — we certainly agree more with each other than we do with outsiders — I think including a shared belief in the foundational premise in David’s argument for OER-enabled pedagogy: “We learn by the things we do.”

Maha’s intervention today illustrated why I care so much about the words we use, and why I think it’s incredibly valuable to keep their meanings — well — more open, if you will. Bear with me.

When David adopted “OER-enabled pedagogy”, he was not just defining a specific focus to empower his own work, he also resigned from participation in further conversation about wider understandings:

“I’m convinced that the terms ‘open pedagogy’ and ‘open educational practices’ are understood so differently by so many people that there is literally no hope of achieving a useful consensus about the meaning of either of these terms. … For my own personal purposes of writing, researching, and advocating, the absence of a shared understanding of these terms removes any utility I previously hoped they had. Consequently, I don’t think I’ll use these terms any longer or participate in the discussion about their meanings going forward.” [source]

No hard feelings though: As David refined his own focus, he wished those of us still participating in such broader, ambiguous discussions well: “Others will doubtless continue this deeply interesting conversation and I wish them well as they do – I am in no way criticizing them as I withdraw from these conversations.” [source]

“OER-enabled pedagogy” is a valuable term. I strongly agree that open licensing and the OER it enables are essential infrastructure in the larger project of open educational activities. It’s useful to have very specific language to talk about the teaching and learning that OER supports. (I would like it if the term had a more graceful hashtag though: #OEREP?) Meanwhile, however, that “deeply interesting conversation” continues, and like it or not, David IS still participating in it (or at least his words are), because, ya know, “everything is a remix in one way or another”. That’s how discourse works — the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Keeping open, open

The immense value of NOT “achieving a useful consensus” around what we mean by “open” and staying in that deeply interesting conversation is precisely because when we foreclose it, when we leave it, we miss out on new understandings for ourselves, and close them down for others. It’s no surprise that some women with very different global perspectives, like Maha and Sarah Lambert (whose paper “Changing our (Dis)Course: A Distinctive Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education” inspired Maha to write today) would remind me why we need to keep definitions of open, open.

Maha and Sarah’s writing expanded my understanding not only because they reminded me that there are other points of view, other contributions, other definitions for things I might have taken for granted, but also because they reminded me how power flows through words and shapes understanding.

For example: A caveat I do have about “OER-enabled pedagogy” is that I feel like it puts the emphasis on the artifacts of OER — the nouns that David champions — when I see what’s needed is greater support for the activities of open — the verbs that represent our action. I’m not suggesting that an emphasis on OER is a form of technological determinism. It would be simplistic thinking indeed to imagine that merely producing OER would generate open education OR social justice. But I am convinced that privileging nouns does shape our understanding and action.

David is so right that open licensing empowers “5R” freedoms that are limited by copyright. But when we start from OER, we are sure to start in the territory that intellectual property has already mapped out on our wild remixture. Nouns are so easily bought and sold. There are other starting places and other maps that lead to other journeys.

When I set out recently to define terms to shape my own work, I settled on “opening knowledge practices” or OKP, as I wrote, “to emphasize the active, verb form of ‘opening’, rather than the adjective ‘open’, modifying some — perhaps more static — noun. Knowledge is not static and the process of opening it is ever ongoing. OKP is an active process, never finished.” As I went on:

“In the same vein, I use ‘opening’ to emphasize my view that the most useful way to think about openness itself is not as a static quality, but as a bendy characteristic. For me, something is open for a moment, in a context, for these people and purposes, according to a (contested) definition of open. I like to think of something opening as a part of a process — opening like a flower or a mind — rather than being open as a state — like a door or gate.”

Coda

I like how the title of Maha’s post — “How Little People Can Be Invisible in the Open” — can have (at least) two discordant meanings: both how less famous/powerful people can be less visible in the open movement AND how hard it is to be invisible when working in the open. The irony in this double meaning is high: actually, Maha’s account shows how EASY it is to be less visible in the open movement, especially if your privilege is “littler”. Or as they say, “You can’t put too much water in a nuclear reactor.”

The conversation continues…

If you read this post, now read the ongoing conversation about it on Twitter, where I learn some invaluable lessons about what I wrote here from people like Maha Bali and Sarah Lambert.

Mothering Digital

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A black and white screengrab from the recording of Douglas Engelbart giving the "Mother of All Demos" in 1968.
Screengrab of Douglas Engelbart from the recording of the 1968 “MOAD”.

Today folks are gathered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (“MOAD”), a notorious event held in 1968 in San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium, where SRI’s Douglas Engelbart and others demonstrated computer systems they were developing and which many folks point to as one of the most important events to presage and shape our digital technology environment today.

While it’s clear that the demo was a key historical moment — not only for technology, but also for digital culture and practices where the “MOAD” is still perhaps the reigning model for how one should expose one’s work to wider audiences — there’s an inadvertent telling moment at the very start of the demo where Engelbart misspeaks, chuckles and then corrects himself that says as much about what has unfolded since the “MOAD” as any technology or practice actually demoed:

If in your office you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsible — responsive…[chuckle]…instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that?
— Douglas Engelbart [view the “MOAD” recording starting at this moment]

Responsible vs. Responsive

“Give the guy a break,” you might say, “he just stumbled over a similar word.” I’m not suggesting there was some nefarious, hidden agenda that Engelbart betrayed accidentally, nor that digital technology carries an inevitable bad seed within that erupted in the “MOAD” via some kind of Freudian slip. What I’m saying is that with 50 years of hindsight, it’s clear that there are deep problems around how computers are responsible: responsible for what and to whom? And that the drive to make computers more responsive — faster, more capacious, smaller, more ubiquitous, cheaper — has greatly overshadowed attempts to make them more responsible, possibly to our great peril.

Mothering Digital

It’s also telling that this seminal [word carefully chosen] event has become known as the “mother” of all demos, as if the development of digital technology were somehow well-described with metaphors of childbirth and mothering. When I look back over these last 50 years since the “MOAD”, I mostly see a record of male achievement, where the contributions of women are mostly either overwritten or absent, at least until recently. My question, then, is whether the balance between responsibility and responsiveness might be struck very differently if digital technology were being developed more inclusively, centered on and driven by the hopes, dreams, and desires of not just men, and not just women, but everyone.

Education for the Public Good

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Lighthouse over the sea, in the public domain from http://coastguard.dodlive.mil/2016/02/legacy-of-light-worlds-largest-lens-shines-aloha-light/.A chance encounter led me to want to post about my evolving views on education as essential public infrastructure. Thanks to a tweet by Sara Goldrick-Rab, I was led to an article by someone I’d never read, Corey DeAngelis, Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute: “Is Public Schooling a Public Good? An Analysis of Schooling Externalities”. If I were not already thinking about education as public infrastructure, I probably would have walked away from this article given all its issues (which I’ll end up addressing, like it or not) and the futility of engaging such polemical works. Yet so much sprang out of my reading of DeAngelis and the other works it led me to that I feel compelled to write, if only to set out some thinking on education as public infrastructure to build on later.

Before we turn to DeAngelis, I want to make some things clear about myself and this post that are definitely not made clear in his work — or really ever made clear in the social sciences tradition DeAngelis purports to work within (which is one of the main (re)discoveries that makes me write). One thing I wrestled with mightily in the reading I did for this post is how works in the social sciences avoid openly discussing the agendas, biases, and perspectives they all exude — no one more than DeAngelis. So what perspective am I writing from and what’s my agenda?

Bluntly: based on standards in social sciences like economics or education policy, I’m entirely unqualified to critique such works. So if reading this you want to question my standing, you might as well move on because you are right: based on whatever standards you want to lay out, I really have got some nerve. At best, I’m a half-baked humanities scholar — ABD for a PhD I’ll likely never complete — and given my post-structuralist and critical theory bent, even many humanities folks look askance at my views. It is my deepest intellectual bias to focus on the unstated agendas and perspectives in other works, especially when they are so blatant, unacknowledged, and constraining as they are in the works of DeAngelis (more on that later), so this post is entirely driven by my habit of looking for the unspoken exercises of power hidden in otherwise “innocent” rhetoric.

Also, I’m unabashedly writing in advocacy for views directly opposed to those DeAngelis promotes: I support an even deeper commitment to education that is paid for and provided by the public, with governments acting as our agents. I don’t find it necessary to try to justify my views as being right based on “scientific” evidence, but just offer them as practical and ethical strategies to support my more general goal: a more equitable and just democratic society, in which humans can better realize individual freedoms and collective goals in an wider context of cooperation and safety. I won’t pretend to try to convince you by hailing some external validation.

So my first point is that those of us calling for certain kinds of change in education be open and clear about our agendas. And my second: let’s never forget that social science traditions (among others) fit very comfortably with unspoken agendas we oppose. The purported objectivity and structure of scholarship can just as (more?) easily support conclusions and recommendations that work against our goals.

And so comes my first bone to pick with DeAngelis, who doesn’t surface his own agenda though it comes through so clearly, despite his article’s masquerade as an unbiased scientific review. His article is filled with a number of unacknowledged givens that shape his argument, like the superiority of privatized market solutions, taxation as coercion, social good being measurable via economic indices, crime as an indicator of social cohesion, economic production as the primary goal of education, and the like. It’s easy to dismiss DeAngelis’ work as polemic disguised as social science, but the deeper problem is how comfortably his argument fits into the larger tradition of social science it is presented as and refers to.

Espalied fruit tree against a brick wall, used in the public domain from https://pxhere.com/en/photo/480475.

The most glaring unspoken bias here is that education can be fully evaluated using only a (pseudo-)quantified economics framework. Only this single lens is necessary to justify dramatic policy recommendations like DeAngelis does when he proposes: “(1) the U.S. government should not operate schools at the local, state, or federal level on the basis of schooling’s being a public good; (2) U.S. citizens should not fund government schooling indirectly through the tax system on the basis of schooling being a merit good; and (3) the United States should instead fund education directly — rather than schooling — through a universal Education Savings Account (ESA) program.” In short: governments should not run schools, and taxes should not pay for schools, but should instead subsidize individuals directly in pursuit of any form of education they choose.

Imagine a society without public schools of any kind, where citizens were given government subsidies to pursue whatever educational activities they deem important. While I can celebrate the idea of educational choice, I believe this model would lead directly to a complete fragmentation of the body politic. Better writers than I have given us many rich imaginings of what that would look like, and it isn’t pretty. Such a model subordinates common benefits of education to individual benefits without any plan for how a common social fabric would be generated out of such individual pursuits.

Against my better judgment, but as due diligence, I started to read some of the works DeAngelis footnotes. Almost every work he references is either written by him and/or a small circle of like-minded writers, or is drawn from the narrow tradition of Milton Friedman and those he influenced (not counting his footnote to dictionary.com). Maybe a lot of scholarship is generated inside such a tiny intellectual bubble, but it seems an especially small world when an author refers to himself in the third person as if he were another thinker. If that’s customary in the discipline, the discipline needs new customs. This is my first day in this field and I already feel like my paltry reading list is more representative of the literature than DeAngelis’ bibliography.

The article I spent the most time with was a meta-analysis of other reports on the effects of voucher education programs in various global contexts — the single work on which DeAngelis rests most of his argument. See above where I say I’m not qualified to critique this kind of work, but wow: what a tortured statistical romp through a lot of disparate data to lead to, well, inconclusive results. Do people actually think this is an effective way to justify policy? DeAngelis basically calls for a total revolution in how education is funded and delivered in the USA based on a smattering of shaky results drawn from less than 20 studies using different methodologies on limited populations in contexts ranging from urban Washington DC to Bogota, Columbia to Delhi and Andhra Pradesh, India. There’s a bunch of math I certainly don’t understand that supposedly makes it all come together around very specific conclusions.

I’m hoping DeAngelis’ work doesn’t pass muster outside the small network of lobbyists and think tanks already working on the same agenda, but I’m shocked to poke under just one rock and find this kind of balderdash in what appears to be a standard contribution to the discipline. When I read stuff like this, I’m super happy not to have joined a guild that devotes itself to writing it. One would have to be fueled by an agenda beyond scientific inquiry to spend so much effort creating such a muddy picture.

It’s really not worth going through DeAngelis’ tortured economic arguments that start with the premise in his title, that education is not a “public good” in the formal economic sense. After leading us through an elementary argument proving this point, DeSantis admits that people who call education a public good really mean it’s good for the public anyways, and so the point is moot. At this point you might be justified in thinking the entire article is a waste of your time (and therefore too my post).

I did begin to find other works that at least only suffered from what may be the common uninterrogated objectivity found across the social sciences, but my short exploration of this field convinced me that the work that needs to be done lies in other pursuits.

A final thought that bemuses me is how DeAngelis, who appears to be have pursued education entirely within public schools, is devoting himself so energetically against them, while my odd educational history of no school at all, followed by elite private education, leads me in the opposite direction. Is everyone just reacting against their own experience?

Caring for OER

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Painting showing a shepherd running away from his flock while a wolf kills sheep.
“The Bad Shepherd” by Jan Brueghel the Younger in the public domain.

This is the beginning of a post I’m researching on the CARE Framework using a workflow that includes Zotero to record and display reference information and Hypothesis to record and display notes.

As I haven’t drafted any content yet, so far this post just displays the references and notes I’ve already collected.

References

A running list of works I’ve found relating to the CARE Framework, collected in the Zotero Open Knowledge Practices group library under the tag “careframework” and here presented in chronological order by publication date. Contact me with suggestions of other works to add or to join the Zotero OKP group so you can add to the collection yourself.

Notes

A dynamic list of my annotated notes on works related to the CARE Framework.


Random Encounters: Thinking Beyond the Totality

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Image of a solar eclipse during totality.
“Totality” by Geoff Livingston licensed CC BY-NC-ND.

This post involves a bit of Frankenstein thinking, because two — seemingly unrelated — posts I came across recently made connections for me. Let’s see if I can explain why I think they’re connected. TL;DR: While I have gigantic respect for both authors of these posts, I think both ask us to view things too generally, without paying attention to details that matter.

The first came to me by way of a challenge prompt in the #EngageMOOC running now, shepherded by Natalie Delia Deckard, Bonnie Stewart, Sundi Richard, Arianna Montero-Colbert, Annie Sadler, et al. The prompt is a quote from John Perry Barlow, who I’m sad to say recently passed away after a life of inspiring me and so many others to think differently. The quote comes from a remarkable meeting between JPB and bell hooks in 1995, which is a conversation I would have thought could come to us only in a wonderful dream if it had not actually happened.

It’s not that there’s anything particularly healthy about cyberspace in itself, but the way in which cyberspace breaks down barriers. Cyberspace makes person-to-person interaction much more likely in an already fragmented society. The thing that people need desperately is random encounter. That’s what community has. — John Perry Barlow

JPB was a more complex thinker than this one quote suggests — he wasn’t a simplistic cheerleader for “cyberspace” the way some have made him out to be. And yet, I find myself caught on how JPB characterizes cyberspace here in just one, positive way: as a breaker of barriers, bringing people together in an otherwise fragmented society through random encounters, that also, somehow, generate community.

From where we sit in 2018, it may be easy to look on JPB’s quote as a naive view. But as soon as I read it, my mind popped to something else I’d read recently that gave me the same kind of pause, from another thinker that has influenced me (and others) a lot: David Wiley, writing on Reflections on 20 Years of Open Content: Lessons from Open Source.

David ends his reflections by asking us if we’d like to live in a world where commercial organizations are heavily engaged in creating, distributing, and stewarding open educational resources, just like so many are now in open technologies. He also chides us in the open community a bit for not being more welcoming of commercial engagement in OER.

I take the same kind of pause I did reading JPB’s quote. To me, both cyberspace and OER are tools that I think can be used to generate positive outcomes, but can also (very clearly I think) be used to generate outcomes I don’t support, like political polarization or business models that sell us back our experiences rather than proprietary content. While cyberspace and OER both have inherent structural characteristics, none of those characteristics guarantee any specific social outcome. To argue otherwise would require a kind of technological determinism, right?

So in the same way I might look askance at the idea of cyberspace healing a fragmented society, I might also question whether an intensifying adoption of OER in commercial educational publishers is necessarily a good thing for education. The Internet might spread and OER may “win” (to paraphrase David), but neither necessarily guarantees the outcomes I want to see.

When I come across these grand statements, I always want to stop and find the more complicated story that doesn’t ask us to believe or accept that cyberspace or OER are always good, just because they sometimes are.