# Open Scholars and Divergence/Convergence, Groups/Networks


**Preparing for a course** 

My supervisor at OISE is co-teaching a course
with two of his PhD students called
"[KMD](http://www.kmdi.utoronto.ca/): Knowledge Communities: Patterns
and Practices", and he very graciously invited me to give a talk about
"open education resources, P2PU, implications of new media for learning
communities, etc". They would require a brief intro, a short "position
statement", at least three resources for the students to read/view
before class, and *"any ideas for any pedagogical plan for your Thursday
session.  Note:  most of the invited speakers will probably just give a
talk and lead a discussion - to fill approximately 90 minutes. BUT WE
ARE OPEN MINDED!"*.

So this is kind of scary. I am all for active learning, and this will be
a seminar-size class with extremely intelligent and outspoken graduate
students, from a number of different disciplines and backgrounds (it's a
course open to students from many different faculties), all with laptops
and phones in very wired room. However, it's a lot more easy, and "safe"
to prepare a talk, and give it, and then open for questions. Which is
what I usually do (also because I usually don't have a choice). It feels
especially challenging because I won't know these students before I come
in, they'll have been together for four weeks (eight sessions, it's a
compressed schedule for summer courses) by the time I get there. It
would feel quite differently if I was designing the whole course. So I
haven't quite decided how I will structure it yet, but luckily I won't
have to decide right now. I did have to give them the three readings
though, which meant that I had to browse around a bit.

(Another neat aspect of the course design, is that all students are
required to pose one question to me, ahead of class. I will apparently
receive these, grouped by topic, the day before I meet them. Fun idea.
I'm all for using online tools and prep work to make the limited time we
have for physical encounters much more valuable.)

I started with watching a [CIDER](http://cider.athabascau.ca/) talk by
[Terry Anderson](http://terrya.edublogs.org/about/) about [Three
Generations of Distance Education
Pedagogy](http://cider.athabascau.ca/CIDERSessions/), which was a
**great** introduction to the field. I really want to go back and read
some of the foundational texts, and his talk gave a very useful and
clear overview of the landscape, with a lot of references for people
(like me) who would like to dig deeper, read the original texts, etc.
I'll probably assign this as one of the resources for the students. I
then ended up watching two [TEDxNYED](http://tedxnyed.com/) talks, while
looking at different resources. The first was by [Jeff
Jarvis](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTOLkm5hNNU&feature=player_embedded),
and the second by [George
Siemens](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BH-uLO6ovI&feature=player_embedded).
Jeff's talk was fun, he talked about how schools should work as
incubators, help students do projects and create stuff, rather than
"stamp out" identical copies. But George's talk was amazing – really a
perfect TED talk, with great story telling, and some very lucid ideas
and thoughts.  Going through all this material (which also brought up
many associations – it's not the first time I've looked at [connectivist
ideas](http://www.connectivism.ca/about.html)) inspired two completely
different lines of thought, and the only thing they have in common, is
that I'll mention them in the same blog post (no thin-slicing here :)).

**Open scholars and closed ones**

What's interesting is that I am both a
very active "self-learner", with my learning networks, Twitter, Google
Reader, online (and offline) conferences etc. At the same time, I am a
graduate student in what we like to think of as one of the world's best
schools of education, [OISE](http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/oise/). I have
access to world-class faculty, and fellow students with very impressive
backgrounds and achievements. However, OISE, and indeed most schools in
North America, do not offer "teaching and learning in higher education",
which was what I wanted to study. So I was torn between the Higher Ed
program in the [Theory and Policy Studies
department](http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/tps/Home/index.html), which will
teach you everything about higher ed, except for what happens in the
classroom (literally), or the [Curriculum, Teaching and Learning
department](http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/depts/ctl/), which deals with
teaching and learning, but almost exclusively in K-12.

I ended up in Higher Ed for my MA, in addition to the [comparative
education program](http://cide.oise.utoronto.ca/), and learnt about the
history of universities, sociological theories of comparing different
school systems, etc. However, on the side, I was attending conferences
on OER, following debates on online learning, and even helped start a
[social learning experiment](http://p2pu.org). Through all this, I
picked up a lot of ideas, thoughts and questions about online and open
learning, although I always felt that I was missing the "fundament".
Which is why I will start my PhD in CTL (mentioned above) in the fall.
In the meantime though, my informal learning network has played an
important role. And even at OISE, although I haven't formally been
enrolled in this department, I have spent a lot of time going to
seminars, meeting with professors, doing projects and in other ways
being involved.

That was setting the stage, now comes my realization. Scholars like
George Siemens, Dave Cormier, Stephen Downes, Terry Anderson – I follow
their work, and I know about and understand their ideas. I watch their
presentations on Slideshare, read their blog posts, sometimes read their
articles in OA journals. I not only know what they are doing – I know
them a lot better than I know most of the professors in my university!
There are people doing great research on learning online, threaded
discussion systems, blogging among students – but if you don't take
their course, you have no access. And apart from the course being access
restricted, and potentially costing money (although the latter is not a
big issue for graduate students, since we pay a flat fee for time
enrolled, not for credits taken), the bigger question is: Why do I need
to study with you for 12 weeks, and write a 30 page essay, to be allowed
to hear your ideas?

Stephen Downes and George Siemens offers a course on connectivism... But
imagine if they told you that this was the only way you could find out
about their ideas? And that it was closed – only people willing to sign
up and go through the whole program, would get access? I can find no
online recordings of presentations the professors in my institution have
done, I can very few blog posts, or slides. There are academic papers,
but these only tell part of the story. What I want to know is your big
ideas, your thoughts about online education. But for a scholarly
journal, unless it's a conceptual idea piece, you have to only present
your specific empirical research. So you might have written a detailed
paper about investigating student blogging amount a sample *n* during
time *t* after intervention *x*... but you did that study for a reason!
And I'd like to understand. The kind of reason that you can explain in a
blog post, and not in an academic journal.

So how is it that I have better "access" to scholars from far flung
parts of the globe (like [Teemu](http://www2.uiah.fi/~tleinone/) from
Finland, or [Leigh](http://leighblackall.blogspot.com/) from Australia),
than to the professors that work in my own school of education? Just
like I felt closer connected to the students in David Wiley's [Intro to
open
ed](http://www.opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_Open_Ed_Syllabus),
than I felt with the 200 students sitting next to me in my undergraduate
classrooms at [UTSC](http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/)? Now, don't get me
wrong – the professors at OISE are wonderfully supportive, and I have
had great conversations with me, and they have given me of their time in
ways that it would be very hard to demand from someone from another
institution. But I want to hear your big ideas. I want you to be **[open
scholars](http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Scholar).**

**Convergence and divergence, groups and networks, common and
decentralized**

This is a point that I will need to think about more,
write about more, read about more. But I'll give it a start here. In
2008, as I started my studies at OISE, I was lucky enough to do a small
seminar class with [Marlene
Scardamalia](http://www.ikit.org/people/scardamalia.html). Marlene is a
legend, she and her husband [Carl
Bereiter](http://www.ikit.org/people/bereiter.html) together came up
with the concept of Knowledge Building (KB), and founded [Institute for
Knowledge Innovation and Technology](http://www.ikit.org/) to promote
it. Together with others, they developed [Knowledge
Forum](http://www.knowledgeforum.com/), a software to facilitate KB
learning – [this](http://ikit.org/fulltext/2003_bringing.htm) is a good
introduction to their ideas, and there are many more papers
[here](http://ikit.org/ikit_ref/resources.php). It's difficult to
explain their ideas in a few sentences, but it's very much built on
constructivism and inquiry.

Think of kids in a classroom acting as junior scientists, they want to
know why leafs change color. They come up with some ideas, then use the
scaffolding built into Knowledge Forum to probe deeper – "my theory is",
"I need to know"... metacognitive prompts that aim to push the thought
process further, rather than what usually happens in a threaded
discussion board – everyone get's to say their opinion, and then the
thread "dies out". In addition, the spatial organization of the KF
database enables people to organize and reorganize the knowledge that
the group has reached, so that the database is not just a chronological
record of conversation, but represents the state of knowledge of the
group at that time, and points the way forward to deeper thinking.

This model – and there is really much more to it than what I just
mentioned, it's very much worth exploring further – is inherently a
group process. The concept of shared cognition – "what the group knows".
It has advantages and disadvantages. I think the model of organizing and
reorganizing knowledge, knowing the "landscape of knowledge", and using
the metacognitive prompts to keep probing deeper is very powerful. It
reminds me of something that always struck me as powerful from [the
first Open Learn
proposal](http://iet-public-wiki.open.ac.uk/index.php/OPLRN_proposal)
(then called OPLRN net) where [CMU](http://www.cmu.edu/index.shtml) and
[OU](http://www.open.ac.uk/) proposed to create a network for connecting
research on open learning.

> ***A research portal.** 

>In more established fields such as cancer
> research, there is a consensus map of the structure of the field, the
> major research questions, and the different sub-communities and
> associated methodologies. It is possible to place oneself on the map,
> and to coordinate effort in a well understood way. In contrast OER
> research is a relatively young field, which has not yet being fully
> articulated and defined. The OLnet will help to facilitate researchers
> in the area to articulate the scope of the field and typical
> methodological stances. At various points the OLnet will trigger a
> series of questions and provide mechanisms to enable those in the
> field to progress answers to those questions. What is the OER research
> map? What is the OER design process? What does it mean to validate an
> OER? What are the central challenges that all agree on? The OPLRN
> seeks to create a structured 'place' where questions such as these can
> be debated, and hopefully, enabling more effective coordination of
> action around issues and OERs of common interest.*

I really found this metaphor compelling. And in a way, it is simply
taking the KB model, and applying it to a much broader field. However,
the KB model, at least as I experienced it, has many shortcomings. What
if your individual interest doesn't align with the group? In our course,
I was one of the only ones to be interested in how KB could integrate
with blogging, thus I could make my nodes and write all I wanted, but I
didn't get much participation from the community. And given that the
database is limited to a specific group (both because of the pedagogy,
and because of technical limitations with the software), I'm not able to
easily pull in people from the outside who might be interested (and they
won't be able to "find" me). It's the epitome of a walled garden, which
might work fairly well for a small group of people over a limited amount
of time (even then it has huge limitations), but not for a larger
knowledge community over longer time. (Which might be why there isn't as
far as I know, a vibrant discussion about knowledge building going on
right now, between practitioners and researchers, inside a Knowledge
Forum database... Or if there is, I don't know about it, can't find it,
and am not invited.)

Now, at the same time as I was taking this course, using Knowledge Forum
for our discussions (and it worked remarkably well for that context!), I
was following along on [Stephen Downes](http://www.downes.ca/) and
[George Siemens](http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/)' initial [massive
online open course](http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism_2008) on
Connectivism. They don't believe in groups, but promote networks.
Networks work very differently, they are fluid, with weak and strong
links, and don't have a defined beginning or end. Actors have different
motivations – selfishness (in a good way, they are curious about
something, and want to discuss it with people they can learn from), but
also altruism, and a desire to boost their "community cred" (which can
lead people to do good things, but which can also result in perverse
incentives). We use a number of tools to connect with each other, both
semantic (let me see all the people tagging their posts a certain way)
and personal (I want to subscribe to Siemens' writings).

Lot's of benefits here. It's all out in the open (it has to be,
otherwise nobody will connect with you). There is a huge amount of
diversity in the network, which leads to much more creativity and new
ideas being introduced. There is a complete freedom to explore different
paths and ideas. Yet, I am sometimes nostalgic for some of the features
of groups and knowledge building. We seem to loose that map of the
landscape that is mentioned in the quote above, and we don't seem to
have any desire to create one. It will be interesting to what extent we
as a community can move to a deeper understanding on a number of issues
during the current [EdFutures course](http://edfutures.com/).

In discussing threaded conversations, Scardamalia and Bereiter writes

> The distinctive characteristics of Knowledge Forum are perhaps most
> easily grasped by comparing it to the familiar technology of threaded
> discussion, which is to be found everywhere on the Worldwide Web and
> also as a part of instructional management systems like Blackboard and
> WebCT. Threaded discussion is a one-to-many form of e- mail. Instead
> of sending a message privately to people the sender selects, the
> sender “posts” it to a discussion site, where all posted messages
> appear in chronological order, with one exception: a response to a
> message is shown indented under the original message, rather than in
> chronological order. Responses to that response are further indented,
> and so on, forming a “thread” that started with the very first
> posting. Like e- mail messages generally, a discussion forum message,
> once “posted,” cannot be modified.
>
> “Threading” produces a downward-branching tree structure, which is the
> only structuring of information (besides chronological) that the
> technology allows. There is no way to create higher-level
> organizations of information, to comment simultaneously on a number of
> messages, or to make a connection between a message in one thread and
> a message in another. Thus the possibilities for knowledge building
> discourse are extremely limited. In fact, our experience is that
> threaded discussion militates against deepening inquiry; instead, it
> is much more suited to rapid question-answer and assertion- response
> exchanges. Although communities based on shared interests do develop
> in some threaded discussion forums, this technology provides little
> means for a group to organize its efforts around a common goal. As the
> number of postings increases, what appears on the screen becomes an
> increasingly incoherent stream of messages, leading discussion
> monitors to impose arbitrary limits on thread length and to erase
> threads of a certain age. Thus a cumulative advance in the state of
> knowledge is hardly conceivable. ([Knowledge Building: Theory,
> Pedagogy and Technology -
> rtf](http://www.ikit.org/fulltext/2006_KBTheory.pdf))

This is about threaded discussions, but what about when everyone is
posting on their own blog, using aggregators to "suck it all in", so we
can "drink from the firehose"? I have no doubt that deep thinking is
happening; much of my thinking is informed by what I have read and
thought about, throughout the last three years, and I constantly see
that the "great thinkers" are improving upon their thinking, playing off
each other. But how efficient is this process with 10-20 learners, in
intense engagement? Or 200, as for the EdFutures course? To what extent
will we be able to, as a group/community/network keep pushing for a
higher level of understanding? Or is that even realistic, or desirable,
given that everyone enters the course with different expectations and
wishes?

In some ways, this dance between convergence and divergence reminds me
of some of the workshops I attended with [CARE
Indonesia](http://www.careindonesia.or.id/) when I worked there. We'd
have great facilitators who got us to write down all our ideas on yellow
notes, that we put up on the board. Then we'd group them into
categories, and give names to the categories, and collapse all the
individual notes into the categories. Then we'd use the titles we'd come
up with, and start generating new ideas around them. Which would be
grouped again, etc. It's a powerful method, but done without enough
leadership, you feel like you are caught in an eternal dance between
narrowing down and broadening out.

I'm going to keep thinking about these things, and I'd love to hear
people's ideas (if anybody got to the end of this piece).