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Slip Sliding Away: The Open in MOOC | iterating toward openness
This is a compelling critique of Rory McGreal and George Siemens’s Openness in Education MOOC that makes a point I've seldom heard as clearly expressed: is a course really open (by which the author seems to mean free in both beer and speech senses of the word) if you have to sign up for it to receive any content? Very interesting point.
I think the problem with this point of view is the assumption that a course is content, ignoring the people and the process that are what really make it happen, at least for this kind of course. If I'm right then it matters who you are and that others know who you are: freedom to interact comes with responsibility to be who you say you are and be recognisable to others. Signing up is not intended as a means of taking something from you (as it might be on a commercial site) but simply as a means of making communication possible.
If it were a face-to-face course then you could turn up, interact, and leave, without ever having to say who you are were: your presence would be sufficient to assure people that you were a person, accountable for your deeds and words. Unfortunately, persistent identity in cyberspace is defined by usernames and profiles. They are a crude, coarse and ugly caricature of a human's identity, but it's currently as good as it gets in asynchronous systems. For real-time webmeetings and the like, it is seldom such a problem: in this kind of learning context it is often sufficient to enter a name, any name, and be present with others much as you might in meatspace. If you want to be identified, great. If not, great. The moderator can always boot you out if you start doing unpleasant things, just as they might ask or require you to leave in a physical-world meeting. More easily, in fact. But it's different in an asynchronous setting where discontinuous continuity is needed. If you are going to engage in a sustained dialogue over a period of time then there has to be a means to sustain a cyber-identity otherwise it just doesn't work, and that has to involve trust on both sides of the persistent connection.
I've been sporadically puzzling about this problem for a few years and coming up with ideas like context switching and faceted profiles in an attempt to regain a little of the richness of identity as experienced in real-world encounters but have yet to reach an ideal solution.
I have an idea though.
The problem of giving your contact information away is only a worry when, as a result, the person or organization (let's call it a 'body') is taking something from you as a result - your privacy and control, in particular. At that point, when you are giving something of value to be used by some body, 'open' is no longer free as in beer.
In my personal communications in networks with people or organizations I don't fully trust, I usually use an email address that identifies the sender - at Amazon, say, I am amazon@jondron.org. This gives me the power to easily identify misuse of the identity (or facet) I choose to reveal, to present different facets of myself to different people, and to very easily filter out any body that I do not like. It also reduces the risk of some kinds of hacking attacks though, as a victim of domain theft, I can attest to the problems that occur when your domain gets lost. It would be cool if these faceted identities were linked to network profiles that could be adapted to different bodies. Better still, in my dealings with them (especially bodies like Facebook that use literally hundreds and sometimes thousands of tracking cookies and related technologies to spy on me) it would be useful to present their personalised facet to them while not letting them see anything else that I do under a different facet. It's possible now, but the process is awfully manual and typically involves lots of different browsers open at once. Wouldn't it be cool to, say, allocate an identity to only one tab in your browser window and disallow access to the rest of your online browsing? The interface would take a bit of work and you would probably have to be quite mindful about the process but, with a bit of care and effort, you would be able to engage on fair and equal terms with any body, revealing only what you want to reveal to whoever you want to reveal it to.
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Jon Dron
Jon Dron
Comments
That's definitely an issue, but my biggest problem with signing up is that I tend to be wary of committing to something when I'm 150% certain of it, which I feel I'm doing by giving information to a free online course.
Hence, I tend to stick to learning resources that I can do at my own pace (even if that pace becomes "when hell freezes over"), in my own way, and without giving any information up... even if that means avoiding the only quality materials available or simply becoming discouraged and looking to other topics.
Indeed - if your are not paying for the product then the chances are that you are the product.
The model being used for this course actually has students who are paying for the full experience (including accreditation) as well as those who are participating for free. These people doing the course for free are, in a very loose sense the product, inasmuch as they are increasing the value of the course for those who are paying, but it's a side-effect of the miracle of Metcalfe's Law rather than a case of exploitation: the value increases for the whole network (by the square of the number of nodes -1) as each new node joins it, so those who participate for free get back more value back than they put in and the more people who contribute, the greater the benefit to all. Knowledge is a nonrivalrous product - giving it doesn't diminish the quantity held by the one giving and, in many learning scenarios, actually increases the knowledge of the one who passes it on. So, in this case, it's a pretty good deal all round!
That's also something I definitely take into account, but not quite the point I was making.
I'm saying that, even in a case where I have to provide nothing more than a pseudonym and a password, having to sign up to access the course materials is a barrier to entry because I have to make a conscious decision to either use a deceptively secretive pseudonym and minimize my participation or to commit to completing the course and to do it at a pace I may or may not feel I can maintain. (In other words, it forces me to decide, right at the beginning, between planning to lurk and exploit the class merely for access to the course materials or being myself and committing to a level of participation I don't fully understand the consequences of.)
Given my historical issues with time management and my desire to sample many fields of expertise without it feeling like a chore, I'd probably be more likely to torrent an eBook someone copied out of O'Reilly Safari than sign up for a free course... and I take pride in not "pirating" things because of the endorsement it implies.
(My view on piracy is that, whether or not I pay for something, using it implies that I'm endorsing the product when I could be using my scarce time to endorse and possibly actively promote a more acceptable alternative.)
In a recent blog post I was trying to figure out how we can interact on the internet, yet still maintain privacy…and your post got me thinking. Maybe we don’t need contact information to create identity.
The first question that came to mind is: what is it, about who a student is, that is important in the context of the MOOC? Where does the value of that node lay? In a name and some contact info? If the answer to that is yes, then…why? How does that information improve the course? Do we use it to connect to more meaningful data about the student, data that might allow us to customize their learning and provide examples based on what we know about them?
I would argue that the value to the network of a new node joining that network lies in the experiences of the new node, and where they already are on the internet. Those are the connections that need to be made. What kind of interests do they have? Which blogs do they follow? Where have they travelled? What schooling have they already had? That way, if we have masses of people signed up for a course (the people in the “long tail” of the internet), we can start to group them based on commonalities that are more relevant than names or locations. Anderson (2007) writes that “we are moving towards a culture and economy where the huge number of people participating in the niches in the tail really matters” (24). This may be a bit futuristic, but I’m thinking that we could potentially leave out the contact information altogether and focus instead on people’s “personal catalogs…which can be considered manifestations of a person’s persona” (p. 46) and then use that information in some sort of algorithm to create a more customized learning experience, independent of facilitator input.
But that’s probably far away….learning analytics have yet to really find a foothold in higher ed….and the types of services that collate these personal archives most certainly don’t exist (that I know of). It’s an interesting way around having to provide contact data though. Or? Do you think it’s just as much a violation of privacy?
Sandi
Anderson, P. (2007). What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education.
It'd certainly give the student more reason to share information but, given how much can be done to uniquely identify an individual by combining a few seemingly benign details (1, 2, 3), I'm not sure whether it'd be better or worse.
On the one hand, it would require more work to identify a person but, on the other hand, it's not hard to partner with an exploitative party with large databases down the road and users are less aware of how easily they can be uniquely identified by this method.
I'd focus, instead, on designs which push the intelligence which requires personal details to the user's PC in the form of open-source code and mitigate the costs of pushing around the large amounts of data consumed by using a peer-to-peer technology like BitTorrent (native applications) or the PeerConnection API in WebRTC (in-browser). (similar in design to to Firecloud)
That way, the user can have confidence that their private information is made no less safe because, for the purposes of the service in question, it never leaves their computer.
It is indeed almost trivial to map rich interaction data to individuals, especially if we don't worry too much about ethics or legal niceties. I think it's a form of stealing or cheating, though it's not terrible if we go into it knowing what we are giving away, how it will be used and why it is a worthwhile trade.
I'm a fan of finding new ways to customize learning paths and putting individuals in control but I'd hate to lose the role of the human facilitator (not necessarily or even normally a professional teacher) - being in control means being able to delegate control to someone else when you want that. And learning is a fundamentally social activity that, even for the most instrumental learning, means engaging with others. Not sure whether it is possible or desirable to be anonymous in that process but I do think we should have the choice.
P2P is a great idea but fiendishly hard to scale in a way that remains easy to use. Pre-eBay/Microsoft, Skype used to achieve that balance really well but very few other implementations have proved to be robust, secure and invisible. There is a middle way: SMTP email ain't bad at hiding its decentralized nature. If we could agree on a combination of non-proprietary protocols (existing attempts include OpenDD, OpenID, OpenSocial, FOAF) then something along those lines might be a happy medium. But, sadly, it looks like proprietary APIs are currently winning in that space.