“we know that faculty members are generally not inclined to post critical evaluation of colleagues’ ideas in public fora.”

This old model of peer review before publishing wastes a lot of time, and obstructs openness (in the accessibility sense) even if the paper is at last freely available. How does the opposite model of peer review after publishing look like? Would reviewers feel urged to do a three-valued evaluation, i. e. positive, negative, or abstention? George V. seems to assume this since he equates no reaction with no assessment:

“To illustrate: I have blog entries that received 0 comments and thus have not been ‘critically assessed.’ Or, one could say, were not interesting, or were not worthy of assessment.”

I think this old three-valued logic is no longer applicable to the abundant online world. We don’t have time to read each post and each comment, and we don’t have time to comment on each useful post, only on salient ones that strike a chord. Therefore, “no comment” would not mean poor quality. Positive comments, however, would be only the tip of the iceberg of agreement – of peer approval after publishing.

(Maybe there would indeed be fewer negative comments, or controversy, than in closed review circles. But helpful, constructive criticisms would certainly not cease, or be ignored, as they often do today in the traditional procedures.)

But while Bonnie looks “beyond the traces and trails we leave behind”, I am still grappling with the effect that the sheer mass of such traces has on our public open visibility. Isn’t it almost like anonymity, when our traces are spread among so many others? Aren’t they fading like the (bare) footprints of his childhood that Roy mentioned in the recent NLC hot seat on online identity? Does this mass and entropy afford a new kind of hiding?

And on the flip side: What becomes of the accessibility of the traces and artefacts that we may want to preserve, when they are buried among masses of newer ones which gradually obsolete the context-dependent meaning of the past ones? Without at least some fracturing, large collections of context-connected resources become just unaccessible, which almost, in a way, destroys their openness.

Research problem: Researchers’ closed group collaboration and personal desktop practices are largely invisible to, and seem disconnected from, the growing open online sharing world. Are there any hidden influences at work? Research question: Do typical patterns of open online participation experiences and practices also change scholars’ habits within their closed environments? For example: Do the different styles of micro-publications (smaller, more context-immersed, more cross-linked, more “ephemeral”, faster than traditional formats, less focussed on selfcontained, measurable deliverables and more open to gradually emerging artefacts) have a noticeable effect on the way researchers organize their personal and group notes and sketches? Does the contact with blogs and wikis also percolate into the use personal wikis and group blogs? Does the pattern of asynchronous participation complement the closed group patterns of meetings (faster, but less reflective) vs. formalized authoring (lonesome but slow-paced)? Method: Survey both scholars who are engaged or not engaged in open environments, to be interviewd via email OR skype (a single format interview would skew the sample towards more asynchronous or more synchronous preferences, respectively).

So since there is not a “trademark” on George and Stephen’s term which would enforce all 4 principles (including autonomy!), everyone can call their endeavour a MOOC, no matter how much they are actually willing to let go their “controletti mentality”.

I admit that I started to become angry about the hijacking of the term. But now, George has just published a wise attitude to this diversity of approaches, and in truly connectivist spirit he resists the (left hemisphere) desire to control the uncontrollable:

For some, that ripple will produce an entirely new conception of higher education. For others, it will result in iterative small-scale improvements in their teaching. I favour the former, and certainly appreciate the work of those who adopt the latter.

So let them water down the term, while we favor the former and go on “experimentation and exploring new modes”.

(A promising field to continue exploring is the conceptual layer of connectivism that has been somewhat neglected recently. Instead of scaling, automating, and more or less scaffolding the topics, I would be more interested in new methods of emphasizing the network connections of varying strengths between the concepts, instead of hierarchically organized pigeon-holes, or snap-in jig-saw puzzle pieces.)

George’s proposed questioning implies uncertainty which many people can’t bear, but we must bear that it’s uncertain whose definition of MOOC will stick.

For this transition, I found it most useful to first think of the community of experts familiar with a given special field.

“To learn, therefore, even a simple fact (such as ‘Paris is the capital of France’) or as much as an entire discipline (Chemistry, Physics, economics) is to become like a person who already knows that fact or practices that discipline.” (Ibid., emphasis mine)

Next, the gaps between the community’s artefacts, its communication, and its learning (or its members’ learning) can be bridged by a continuum of varying Boettger distance: From

• notes for me now/ soon,
• for me, later,
• for people I know well/ who know the topic well,
• to large public.

where the artefacts become increasingly explicit with increasing distance (right end) from one’s own brain (left end).

This continuum helped me to visualize the difference, and gradual comparison, between artefacts (right end) and human-like learning (left end) of an entire community.

In a group, the shared goal of collaboration generates the pressure that everybody has to participate and decide. With shudder I remember my schooltime class discussions where the teacher wanted us to practice to utter an opinion — no matter how weak our background of the topic was. (This is probably where the deep aversion of many of my generation against “broad” shallow knowledge comes from.) More aggravating, in synchronous, face-to-face, physical spaces it is painful to sit and keep silent. So when the space has an open door, escape.

In an online network such as this MOOC, by contrast, it is acceptable to keep silent whenever I want, for whatever reason. Maybe I cannot yet argue because my differentiated view is not yet settled. Or I cannot yet decide. Or I embrace the autonomy to pick topics to deep dive and the current one does not interest me sufficiently to develop an opinion. Or I am (temporarily) a lurker, or I just choose to ignore a topic. All this does not yet cause me to signoff (walk away). In fact, there is a great dark figure of subscribers who have not yet walked away, and nobody knows what they do with their Daily newsletter.

If the open space is perceived as a network, not a group, then there is no such thing as the binary (black or white) status of collaborator or non-collaborator, and no pressure for the binary status of nodding or walking away. Instead, the three options of agreement, non-reaction, and dissent, may now be handled differently:

Under face-to-face pressure, dissent is often politely disguised as non-reaction. Online, however, this does not make sense since nobody can react to each agreeable statement, anyway. By contrast, we are free to pick the salient points that resonate in a particular degree. If we react only to salient points, both we and the originator of these points will benefit. And the human mind has a great ability of detecting salient differences, which needs to be practiced, as part of the digital literacy to skim over ever more information.

If non-reaction is not to be equated with dissent, it should be easier to be accepted by those who are avid with decisions and opinions and participation. Even though they are certainly right that participation and having an opinion is desirable, they need to accept their bias and need the open mind that participants may be different.

One quick answer would be that knowledge is identical on all three layers, but this is exactly what I cannot wrap my head around.

OK I can accept that the borders between the layers may sometimes blur. The connections between concepts are so similar to neural connections that, for example, the concept of “grandmother” seems just as if it was located in a single grandmother neuron. And when thinking of her cookies recipe, this external resource (layer 3) might sloppily be equated with the concept/ idea of her cookies (layer 2), and I (layer 3) “connect to the idea” (layer 2). But I cannot similarly equate some knowledge in a society with the knowledge in a person. And therefore I cannot picture the social knowledge as residing in the connections between people, in the same way as individual knowledge clearly is located in the connections between the concepts, or finally, between the neurons. The very word “knowledge” simply sounds different to me in the different contexts. (Perhaps this due to my ESL limitations and the different usage in German.)

The most striking difference shows when the social knowledge grows, i. e., when “learning” by the society occurs: Saying to “learn” something that nobody yet knows, sounds for me as a stretched, alien usage of the word where everybody would normally speak of research, or scientific or scholarly progress. And the resulting knowledge appears different, too.

In the sense of research, “learning” of the entire society would involve a shared goal, i. e. it would be collaborative while normal learning together may be cooperative. And of course, the obvious connotations of societal knowledge are much different, as well: The body of human knowledge is usually thought of as the stock of many libraries, artefacts, external resources — even though I am aware how much important knowledge does not fit to this simplistic view, is not codified and explicit but implicit and distributed: It takes the combined tacit knowledge of many people to build an airplane; Trusting the experiential knowledge of many generations is foundational for our world view; I acknowledge the importance of online resonance between persons, and I even understand how discussions can literally reside between people. But I cannot grasp societal knowledge as lying between people in the same way as individual knowledge resides in the connections between concepts or neurons. Using the same word “knowledge” for both phenomena, appears to me as too stretched, or as a lifeless abstraction, while the common neuronal metaphor can be much easier understood.

Any hint or reference is welcome.

Repurpose is a powerful concept. It allows to pick up the emphasis on one thing and utilize it for the emphasis on another thing which is somehow related to the original thing. So the emphasis on repurposing itself can be (creatively) repurposed into the emphasis on creativity. Can “repurpose” even be repurposed into “morph” such that “repurposing” itself becomes “creating” ?