thanks Jon for sharing this. I read it years ago, but got better understanding and more thoughts this time reading. 

Thanks for the insights on this, Jon. A small group of us at AU are researching ID principles for MOOCs, which don't really count as formal education but fit more closely to public education ala museums and libraries. This is not to be sneezed at, but will require attention to design, and clear articulation of the relationship between MOOC participation and credits in formal learning environments.

Cheers,

MCI

Thanks @Apostolos - I'm opposed in principle to closed journals, at least when they make use of the outputs of authors whose work is already funded from the public purse, when they use free labour by reviewers and editors, then sell it back to them at a whacking profit, denying access not only to the people that paid for it but, surprisingly often, even the writers. It made sense in times of information scarcity, where there was genuine value to be gained from printing and distributing paper journals that demanded substantial resources and expertise. It's insane now.

I'm still on the fence about author-pays versions of 'open'. On the whole I think it is an awful idea akin to vanity publishing - at the very least, it discriminates against those with lesser funding, no matter how good their research, and it accounts for a huge number of predatory emails I receive every day asking me to submit papers or join editorial committees on shady for-profit fly-by-night but vaguely 'proper' looking journals. On the other hand, there is a significant cost involved, even for fully online journals using open source software: at the very least they need admin assistance, technical support, and hosting. I'm very sad indeed to see that one of my favourite open journals,  JIME, has gone down that path now, but they make a compelling case that they cannot afford to run it for free any more. It seems to me that this is a place where alternative funding, whether through governments/research councils, crowd-sourcing or even voluntary contribution might make a lot of sense. Some (including our own IRRODL) already make use of such things.

Thanks @Marti - yes, I think alternative models akin to those of museums and libraries do make sense, at least for xMOOCs. Nice way of seeing it. I'm not sure about the credits though: seems to me that this should be entirely disaggregated rather than articulated as, the moment such things are introduced, you wind up with fundamentally irresolvable conflicts between learning and accreditation. Of course, to support learning, you might ask for portfolios or similar outputs, which might be very good evidence to later use to gain certification.

cMOOCs are quite a different matter. Because the learning design (such as it is) essentially comes from the participants, they are less easily dealt with from a traditional ID perspective. We have quite a lot to say that is relevant to this in our recent book. Personally, I think most of the answers lie in the design of environments, including pedagogies and other techniques as well as virtual spaces and algorithms, that enhance the ability of the crowd to teach itself, rather than to superimpose traditional models that emerge out of mediaeval physical constraints on top of them. It's about ways of learning through networks, sets and collectives, not through the kind of learning designs that work in traditional groups, most of which just don't fit with big-scale social learning (though can work at a big scale if a largely asocial objectivist model is used). This is relatively new territory, though we have a lot to learn from earlier constructivist and informal learning research, especially in the areas of distributed cognition and communities of practice.

It would also be very useful to get away from the whole notion of objectives-driven fixed-length courses altogether - I like the library/museum framing for that. I'm quite a fan of JIT small-chunk methods that can be picked and assembled, like one might pick and assemble books or views of exhibits in a museum - Khan Academy, YouTube, Instructables, Q&A sites, StackExchange, etc - where good ID can definitely be of very great value.

I also found this artcile interesting and thanks for bringing it to our attention.

I'm not sure that the article substantiates your claim at the end.  It is true that theose who entered WestPoint with internal motivation outperfomed and lasted longer than those with external motivations. However the authors state "The lagged nature of the research design used here does not allow for the explanation of additional variance that would surely result from measuring changes in the motivational arcs of cadets during the interim years that unfolded following their entry to West Point." Indicating that they had no data on how the offering of rewards or stimulating internal motivations during the educational experience (as they give examples in the conclusion) would really help.  However, the argument is LIKELY to stand as it seems to have construct validity at least, but needs empirical validation.

That's a fair point - I should have said that it is supportive of the argument rather than proof of it. A number of the papers referred to in the text do actually prove the point, though. For example, A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation from 1999 offers 128 studies that demonstrate the dangers of extrinsic rewards in numerous contexts. Further work over the last 15 years from the likes of Ariely, Kohn, Deci and Gneezy (and a cast of thousands) has strongly confirmed this though, as the paper suggests, most often in controlled experiments and seldom over longer periods than a few months.

I finally got round to reading this Jon, sorry it took a while.  A great blog post that really examines the issues raised in this piece.  I remember when I looked at the article when it was originally linked from Hack Education, that I also felt the need to respond.   Your piece does it way better than I could ever do.

- Mark Curcher

Hi Jon

As I engage more in a context of engineering microbes to do useful things, I connect with the suggestion to build and tinker, rather than to engineer. That is how it works anyway, the term "engineering" seems to imply a higher sophistication. It's questionable to assume we have that sophistication, especially when to comes to working with living cells who generally remain a mystery regarinding how they work and what they do.

I like the idea of a discipline of 'genetic tinkering' very much. I can't help feeling it might not have a great effect on the public image of the discipline, no matter how accurate it might be in reality.

It's a great pity that bricolage has got such a bad press through the likes of Levi Strauss etc. It certainly connotes something less well understood in popular usage, but it's just wrong to think of it as therefore somehow lesser than engineering. Tinkering is and has ever been an incredibly powerful source of invention and, as we slowly begin to realize that reductive science can only ever account for the smallest fraction of phenomena in the world that actually matter to us (e.g. see Stuart Kaufman's Reinventing the Sacred - fine, crazy, brilliant work summarized briefly here) it is also one of the most powerful tools at our disposal for understanding and engaging with a complex world.