What happens when you look at the future of teaching and learning through the lens of DIY media and participatory culture? At the most recent DIY Media seminar at the Annenberg Center on October 19, Todd Richmond’s presentation on open educational resources and Bob Stein’s preview of a toolset that will enable people to add multimedia annotation to online texts, offered two glimpses of a possible future upheaval in education. (The slides from Richmond’s and Stein’s presentation are available as a Quicktime movie.)
(This post complements and expands on the report Adrienne Russell posted immediately after the event. Although Richmond and Stein presented as a tag team, going back and forth between their presentations, I’m separating this post-seminar report into two different posts. I hope this will afford two different conversations in the comment threads.)
Todd Richmond is currently a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, and the Center for Creative Technologies at USC. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinema-Television. He specializes in basic and applied research in the broad field of digital networked media, social networks, and social software. He is currently working on a Hewlett Foundation-funded research project titled “Viral University Education” which seeks to better understand and facilitate the uptake of freely available open educational content on the Internet by using a variety of social software tools and technologies to create viral learning communities and content.
In his presentation on October 19, Richmond compared the future technology-triggered transformation of educational institutions to the “perfect storm” that hit the music industry when several different factors intersected to disrupt the existing institutions for making, distributing, and monetizing music: millions of people acquired broadband connections and used sufficiently powerful personal computers, the MP3 format made it easy to encode, transmit, and decode music via the Internet, digital tools for capturing and editing audiovisual content made “studio quality” production widely available, online social networking made p2p and viral distribution possible. Richmond included one more technical factor, “common metastructure.” In music, the common metastructure of bar, beat, and temp made remix and mashup media possible.
The same forces that disrupted the music industry can be applied to education, and the content that could drive a transformation in teaching and learning — and the institutions through which it happens — is becoming available as other universities, including Rice and Johns Hopkins, joined MIT, which in 2001 began to make its “open coursware available.” Richmond sees another factor at work here, the same “commons-based peer production” at work in Wikipedia. The challenges to a wave of change in education are, Richmond enumerated, “IP, IP, IP…uptake, IP, and tools.”
Open educational resources, Chinese Backstreet Boys video, viewed one and a quarter million times on Youtube, as an example of “going viral.”
The availability of DIY media production and distribution tools changed the asymmetry between the producers, distributors, and distributors of music, Richmond pointed out, referring to that changing power asymmetry as “the delta.” With Wi-Fi in the classroom and lecture videows online, and student familiarity with laptops, remix, mashups, blogs and wikis, together with the power that “Googlepedia” teachers and learners, the delta in education is changing: the previously strictly hierarchical relationships between teacher and learner are changing.
“Resistance is futile,” believes Richmond: although existing educational institutions are not generally embracing a digitally transformed future, “the educational sector will be dragged into the future kicking and screaming by the next perfect storm.”
In education, there may be good reasons for maintaining the role of teacher, where the roles of middlemen in the music business may not be necessary. “Optimizing the delta,” Richmond calls it: how do motivated learners and skilled teachers make use of open educational resources to best achieve their aims?
In the discussion that followed the presentations by Richmond and Stein, and the smaller seminar after lunch, discussion turned, as Adrienne noted, to the way institutions can react to the forces for change that new technologies and social practices might enable. The existing university classroom has to change, but how? What might be the event or new driving forces that produces the storm Richmond predicts? Will the extensions of copyright law such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, technical barriers such as digital rights restrictions, and politically-sanctioned shifts in net neutrality become insuperable barriers to educational change? Will the non-educational reasons for schooling — a place to park the kids while parents work and boot camp behavioral trainingfor industrial-era employees and consumers — prove to be the immovable object that stops the irresistible forces Richmond foresees?
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While I agree with Todd Richmond’s values for Δ I vehemently disagree with the semantics he attaches to those values.
I suggest where he claims “Order” one substitutes “Domination” and where he asserts “Chaos” perhaps one might consider “Freedom.”
I’d like to vehemently disagree with Mr. MacEwan. Where Mr. Richmond attempt to provide qualitatively neutral terms, Mr. MacEwan wishes to hit us over the head with a subjective point of view of “better” and “worse”. The connotations of “domination” and “freedom” in the current culture make these a poor alternative.
“there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” - Hamlet.
I vehemently disagree with my cat Milo. He says the delta is “meow.”
I actually tried to leave the semantics to the reader. I believe that the “analog” has/had a large delta which result(ed) in a high degree or order. In the commercial sector, this meant profit (economic order). In education, it was order in the classroom and imprimatur. That does not necessarily lead to domination…I suppose it depends on which side of the stick you grab.
As for chaos, just like order it is a double edged sword. One person’s freedom is another’s anarchy. I don’t think the delta itself has either inherent…or perhaps both are rolled up into it and it depends on how you collapse the wave equation (bringing yet another cat into the discussion).
Oppression can take place both in order and in chaos. What I think is more interesting is that chaos generally provides increased opportunity.
“I drank what?” - Socrates
While the pundits ponder and pontificate, the DIY viral objects are already in the works. Todd Hamilton, you have done a fabulous job of describing the inevitable. After the storm, out of choas a new order can be expected, where the cognitive structure of knowledge itself determines the patterns of learning resources. Just like the best Mentos video, the best osmosis tutorial will go viral. Thanks for this encouraging and illuminating post!
Without a doubt, that shift in the delta does entail a change in power dynamics. The phrase that has started to become a cliche in discussing the changes in teaching style that new technologies and learning styles are driving is “shifting from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side.” My classes might be an exception, since the subjects are “participatory media” and “digital journalism” — which means I have to confront the presence of Wi-Fi in my classroom, rather than turn it off or ignore it. But I have found it effective to shuffle roles — ask the students to break into groups, do a quick hunt-and-gather expedition online for information relevant to the current syllabus discussion, compile the results on a wiki, then report back to the class. At that point, I can provide context, facilitate discussion among the class as a whole, push them further down routes they started to explore in their small groups. So while it isn’t “chaotic,” the shifts between professor as lecturer and facilitator and students as researchers and discussants is certainly more turbulent than traditional lecture-and-discussion format.
DIY at UK’s Open University: A major new open education resources initiative called OpenLearn became a reality in October, this time at UK’s Open University. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation thus added another large program to the work it supports in this area—which includes the pioneering MIT Open Courseware project and the Rice and John Hopkins materials mentioned above. The announcement of the new British program includes this noteworthy DIY breeze from the coming perfect storm:
“Another hallmark of OpenLearn will be the ability it offers students and teachers to add, reorganize and republish content to suit their own needs in a part of the Web site called LabSpace.”
This new DIY space for Open University students is no experimental straw in the wind. It is a promising step into the digitally transformed present by a major educational establishment.
Here is more background from the October 25, 2006 announcement of OpenLearn:
“The growing movement to make educational materials available to anyone with an Internet connection marked a milestone today when the United Kingdom’s venerable Open University launched a new online collection of curricula, as well as software to enhance its use.
“The new Web-based program, called OpenLearn, will give students and teachers access to 5,000 hours of curricula on topics ranging from the arts to science and technology, and at levels ranging from those suitable for a beginning student through post-graduate study.
“OpenLearn differs from the rest of Open University, which requires students to pay tuition, in that its courses and other educational materials are being made available for free and do not lead to the granting of a degree. Another hallmark of OpenLearn will be the ability it offers students and teachers to add, reorganize and republish content to suit their own needs in a part of the Web site called LabSpace.
“Open University was founded in 1969 as an initiative of the British government. It is the only university in the UK dedicated to distance learning, or the teaching of students through course materials distributed via television, the Internet and postal mail. Today it is the UK’s largest university, with more than 160,000 students across the country and another 40,000 worldwide.”
Sights and sounds of a mighty storm —
An aspect of the digital storm that education will experience is the bountiful superior online content to anything education can create, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Special Exhibit titled: “>http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={23E721E6-F42D-4773-8FF7-B1EE1CDD00A9}”> New Orleans after the Flood: Photographs by Robert Polidori.
Barely a year after the storm that hit New Orleans, the Met’s online exhibit displays 6 of the 20 photographs that comprise the collection, and offers in podcast or download the full audio of the explanation from the exhibit gallery. School students should be using the exhibit as primary study material.
The URL for the exhibit is:
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={23E721E6-F42D-4773-8FF7-B1EE1CDD00A9}
Richmond’s presentation sounds interesting.
I’ll briefly drop my two cents here because I have very strong feelings about the structure of American education (all the good and the bad)..
The education universe is economically, politically, and socially different than the music/entertainment universe. To say that a revolution in the former will be analogous to the one we have seen in the latter will prove to be false. Not to mention the music business is in the private sector, whereas 85% of K-12 education is administered and governed in the public sector. Two very different universes.
I mean no disrespect to Todd Richmond,
and I’m not sure how far he took that comparison..
The social values the average American parent holds for education cannot be underestimated. Academic attainment (for better or worse) is surveyed and ranked as being #3 or lower as a reason for choosing schools (see Paul Teske surveys, CU-Denver).. And I suspect the younger the student in age/grade, the more strongly a parent will believe in the socialization and convenience values associated with the traditional structure of schooling and the classroom.
What Richmond suggests could more readily happen in higher education, but those political, economic, and social forces that need to be considered more carefully..
I mean no disrespect to Todd Richmond at all, but such a sweeping comparison is misleading rhetoric, and I believe detrimental to acquiring sound understanding of the education sector.
We have had “participatory learning” reforms in education in the past, but under different names – there have been several waves going back to Dewey in the early 20th century. (see Diane Ravitch – Leftback) Among other names, reforms have pushed for “discovery learning”, “child-centered learning”, and “constructivism”.
It could be that today’s ICTs may distinguish “participatory learning” from these other similar styled reforms.. the viral effect of online communities and networks is indeed powerful, but it is also value-neutral.
Nevertheless there will always be a role for teacher and inherent asymmetry in learning processes.. as the availability of information (and sources) increase in the future, the teacher will then become increasingly essential to act as an information filter for students.
Otherwise if we do have perfect symmetry, then how will students be able to distinguish good from bad information? Not to sound cheeky, but what will “learning” mean when it comes to getting a good education? Under a purely symmetrical framework, I think we might advocate ignorance and regress educationally.
Students need structure.. they need (some amount of ) direction.. they need accountability.. and they need assistance to determine bad information from good information. If, as suggested by Richmond, the revolution does take place and it happens swiftly, then we need to be critical of it, for the future value of an education.
I think big changes will happen, gradually, but I have to say I’m skeptical about the revolution suggested above by Richmond and others. And I’m not a natural skeptic.
If I misunderstood any previously posted remarks (and this is always possible)… I apologize.
I think this is great topic. Please don’t take my remarks the wrong way. I just believe when talking about “change” in specific social sectors (education, economy, politics, health, law, etc) we need to be mindful of the socioeconomic structures and forces at play, and even some history.
Otherwise we may be reinventing the wheel, retrying failed experiements, and never happen to pause and realize it.