Notes After a Meeting With a Berkeley Graduate School of Education Group 07 2011

8/6/2019 Notes After a Meeting With a Berkeley Graduate School of Education Group 07 2011

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Notes after a meeting with a Berkeley Graduate School of Education group 07/2011

1. Changing roles of the universities: from keepers of relatively constant knowledge to networkcurators

People within professional networks learn by making - creating, building, authoring. Evenperipheral participants in communities of practice generate content (1) by blogging,

commenting, remixing, aggregating and sharing. At yesterday's meeting of Math Future, I

interviewed a teen girl who has been blogging and teaching mathematics online for several

years (2). Since these practices grow, the sheer amount of newly-generated content in a robust

network may rival the amount of "old and stable" - peer-reviewed, vetoed, sorted, packaged -

content. Every minute 35 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.

Therefore, network organizers need to switch from keeping and distributing relatively static,

slowly changing content, to curating explosively growing, rapidly changing content. During the

meeting, I said that content is hard currency, but curated content is capital. I meant "capital"literally, as a factor of production: networks that have strong curation become healthy

mechanisms or ecosystems supporting content creation at the modern speeds, and nurturing

content creators within the network. Curation includes such activities as aggregation of

synchronous and asynchronous interactions archives, distillation and elevation of key threads in

conversations for continuity, keeping chronology of past and future interactions and meta-

tagging of participants, activities and social objects. Knowledge is interaction, and network

organizers are curators of the interactions.

2. The P in PLNs - persons and personal learning networks

What is the structure of a network from one member's point of view? Sometimes the word

"flat" is used to describe people's relationships within networks, compared to hierarchies, but I

don't find this metaphor fitting for designing communities. On the basis of psychology of groups

and topologies of networks (3), the image I find most helpful for describing PLNs (4) is a fractal.

Each person is a node in the network, represented by knowledge/content/interactions "tagged

with" this person's name - created, remixed, or aggregated with participation of the person.

People form small, stable in time, inter-connected clusters of three to twelve members who

have close enough goals, levels of knowledge and participation, time zones or schedules, and

otherwise have a hope of making a relatively tight crew (nakama, project group, quest party -

think "the four musketeers"). These groups are often local, but can extend online: the same

people also frequently "bump into" one another in networks, invite one another to events,

"friend" one another on social platforms and otherwise closely interact. Finding such people is

hard, but necessary for one's psychological comfort and professional success. I will go as far as

saying that having such a group makes a new teacher successful, and not having such a group

prevents success. What Dor described as "project groups" can be developed to address these


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needs.

As we zoom out in the network fractal, there are larger structures - groups, communities or

tribes incorporating anywhere from several dozen to several hundred members. It is tempting

to think of a college course as automatically being such a tribe, but it's not always true. Ideally,

tribes persist in time (and class groups often dissolve when the class is over). More importantly,

tribes run on the "soft power" (5) such as the attraction of common interests, or collaboration in

personal projects. Courses that want to become tribes need to downplay their "hard power"

(certification) and cultivate their network and community roles. Courses can play a role in

supporting the "10-year vision" of a community of practice Eric described as growing out, and

beyond, the idea of "a course." But courses - or new post-course entities, such as the Open

Study community based on the OpenCourseware depository at MIT (6) - need to be specifically

designed for it to happen. To become incubators of tribes, courses need to be open to

participation from the outside, in particular, welcoming students' supporting crews even if they

aren't officially course members. Courses also need to support projects that will continue when

the course ends - meaning the interaction among the "tribe" members will go on. In addition to

becoming "starter tribes" for students, courses can collaborate with other online communities.

The online tribes (groups, circles, hangouts) where course members participate can be led, long-

term, by professors teaching the course (based on their ongoing research and development

work). Or these groups can come from the next level in the fractal: the network of communities.

Entities that think big and provide support, coordination, and curation at the level of

communities become powerful forces shaping the whole educational landscape. This is a very

fitting role for the Berkeley GSE, in the long run. Even if the start is a small pilot with a few crews

of students, which I highly recommend, thinking about all levels of the fractal - from crews, to

tribes, to networks of communities - can allow scaling up through these levels in the future. The

first goal is to help each student build his or her PLN by joining several persistent online

communities, wherein it is possible to find members for the tighter personal crews that will

provide the ongoing support during the crucial first few years of teaching.

3. Individualization and P2P - peer-to-peer structures

Networks can support both deep individualization of learning and deep collaboration, one being

impossible without the other. To collaborate as peers, P2P network members need to be

sufficiently autotelic, that is, to bring their own purpose and their own supply of meaning,

significance and relevance to each endeavor. But these qualities only develop when each

member can find highly individualized and powerful support for his or her growth, provided by

the community. Therefore, one of the big roles your project can play is in helping students grow

- as individual, unique nodes in the network. This has two immediate consequences for the

design. First, the necessary depth of individualization isn't sustainable in top-down, hierarchical

structures. Second, the P2P structures where individualization is sustainable require a shift from

intellectual consumerism (7) to co-production models. Each node in the network has to provide


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peer support for other nodes.

Deep individualization of education, in its mentor-apprentice form, is very efficient (8) but does

not scale. However, P2P structures can provide enough support for almost any depth of

individualization, at any scale, as gigantic but highly individualized MOOCs can demonstrate (9).

There exists know-how (and software) for supporting peer assessment, peer review, peer

coaching, peer projects and so on, that is, P2P designs for all aspects of the learning process.

These designs require a paradigm shift - simply put, the shift from taking, to making and giving.

When students are intellectual consumers, their question is:

- What am I getting out of this?

The P2P mindset requires these questions:

- What am I making and sharing?

- How am I helping my peers?

Students can graduate with a resume - a portfolio of real contributions to the communities of

practice - containing the content they created, collections they curated, ideas they remixed and

commented, crews they put together and managed, interactions they initiated and hosted.

Designing for this goal depends on P2P mechanisms that support deep individualization of

learning; help each member grow a healthy PLNs with many levels of participation; and make

curation of the incredible amounts of content and interactions sustainable. This design aligns

with the deep motivations, as well: most people want to become educators for the purpose of

giving to others.

Appendix: references and pictures

(1) Bloom's Digital Taxonomy http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy


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(2) Luyi Zhang's Geometric Delights http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/GeometricDelights

(3) Paul Baran, "On Distributed Communications: 1. Introduction to Distributed Communications

Network" (August 1964).


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(4) A blog post with links to examples of PLNs and a video explaining ithttp://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2008/04/5-things-you-can-do-to-begin-

developing.html

(5) http://chronicle.com/article/The-Future-of-Power/127753/

(6) "Make the world your study group" http://openstudy.com/

(7) Droujkova (2011). Intellectual consumerism in mathematical learning. Slides from the

Connecting Online presentation

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ddjkthrd_375c895vjdc

(8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_Sigma_Problem

(9) For example, the currently running eduMOOC with 2500 participants

http://sites.google.com/site/edumooc/

Dr. Maria Droujkova

07/2011

Notes After a Meeting With a Berkeley Graduate School of Education Group 07 2011

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