well...people are really always at the core of every technology and every decision about technology...would we let someone randomly walk into our homes when we're sitting around in our jammies...? Agency and choice are stil important - Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed might be of interest to jet-lagged Jon and Terry who can't let us see an article because it's behind a proceedings subscription wall.

Addendum: chapter 3 - limit situation and human praxis

"Those who are served by the present limit-situation regard the untested feasibility as a threatening limit-situation which must not be allowed to materialize, and act to maintain the status quo."

Chapter 4

The oppressors develop a series of methods precluding any presentation of the world as a problem and showing it rather as a fixed entity, as something given--something to which people, as mere spectators, must adapt."

For cultural invasion to succeed, it is essential that those invaded become convinced of their intrinsic inferiority."

___

So...I guess if we think we are intrinsically inferior to hard technologies like automated credit card company telephone systems - they will stay hard perhaps?

We can happen to soft systems a lot more easily than we can to hard ones. Hard things reify historical choices and limit future choices: that's the point - it's how they achieve efficiency and freedom from error. Inevitably they therefore reduce agency - it's why Franklin talks of them as 'prescriptive' technologies.

No matter how rigid the process, you can always choose not to participate if that's what you really want to do but it is more than a simple matter of weighing up the costs. Under most circumstances, non-participation will contradict at least one other choice you have made (at least, to participate) which may involve ethical as well as pragmatic concerns. Contradictions always make decision-making complex at best because logic, by its own rules, fails utterly in the face of them. That's thankfully not a problem for me as, right now, calls from abroad could be much more important to me than money, which is why I happened to be purchasing expensive flights that I couldn't afford. The off switch wasn't an option.

well, humans are never good at logic anyway...ask any marketing or psychology professor (or billion-dollar-profit credit card company)

Hopefully, you'll have a nice spring weekend in Edmonton and get back on Alberta SleepTime for a few days before you head back home over the Big Pond again. 

If nothing else, you've got an excellent personal example of hard/soft for your MoodleMoot talk.

Very nice - I have indeed spent longer than strictly necessary reading about complexity theory and related things, but I hadn't made that explicit connection. Makes sense.

I think that there may be some useful parallels between soft/hard and chaos/order and being/becoming though it's maybe a little more complex .  Soft technologies afford change while hard ones actively prevent it (they kind of ossify history) so some softness is a prerequisite for emergence. On the other hand, there is probably no such things as a purely soft or a purely hard technology so change is always possible, especially as technological evolution is ubiquitous no matter how hard or soft a technology may be. At the very least, you can add additional technologies to hard ones to make them softer and vice versa. However, if you want churn to occur, small, volatile spaces are far more effective than big stable ones because of the nature of complex systems. And learning is all about churn. The perfect learning environment is therefore (arguably) one that is just on the ordered side of the edge of chaos: from a technical perspective, that's where complex behaviour happens, including evolution, development and learning. 

Yes, definitely.  That's great -  "Learning is churn".  I'm getting a T-shirt

I like Doll's statement that curriculum has a culture although I'm guessing his view that it's Protestant is debatable.

However, culture implies temporality and history, and your Landing project is definitely part of a historical development in the culture of online learning.

You have one view (a great one BTW) of what AU's teaching/learning is/can be...other people have very different views, since they come from different knowledge/teaching & learning cultures.

Given that everyone comes from their own place (I'm interested in Downes' state-based learning and Dwayne Donald's place-based pedagogy) I'm not sure that there is a "perfect" learning environment, since everyone's skills and feelings towards technology and what's "minimally necessary" to understand/include in teaching and learning are so different.

For example, I am really enjoying my in-person classes at the U of A but I also enjoyed my MDE course through AU.  Different cultures (traditional vs. distance education), yet both allowed for my personal evolution.  However, I think we don't support enough of this unplanned/emergent openness/softness & complex behavior at the undergrad level. 

Unfortunately, it's taking a while to get over our Eurowestern colonialism approaches (sigh).

I'm looking forward to hearing your talk at MoodleMoot

I read your post and wihesd I was good enough to write it
- Tamber

I know a few classmates who extensively used such services when I was in college. None of them have a professional job today. They like to complain about how hard they worked in college only to be land on jobs they could have had without college. Would you hire a programmer who can't tell the difference between a class and object or a English Language Grad who is not sure whether Charles Dickens preceded Shakespeare. By the way, it is just as easy to get programming assignments done online for a small chunk of change.

You can only get so far with cheating. Eventually, you pay the price.

I say, let them cheat. Eventually they would join the ranks of unemployed degree holders.