note: Author - Cole Camplese, "Embedding Student Expectations". Originally submitted November 5th, 2008 to the OSS and OER in Education Series, Terra Incognita blog (Penn State World Campus), edited by Ken Udas.
I hope that you'll bear with me as I bring a slightly different approach to the posts here at Terra Incognita. My interests and passions fall directly in the argument for openness and transparency across all forms of teaching and learning. I am not going to write a case for opening learning or open courseware, but I will attempt to engage you in a discussion related to our overall willingness to change some of our fundamental models to empower those around us to participate.
I am curious of how we see the emergence of remix culture and where it fits into our domain - and I am really anxious to know if these notions resonate with the readers here. So if my post misses the mark I apologize in advance, but with that . . .
I have been making the argument lately that what is beginning to happen (in a more general sense) is that the web is finally starting to fulfill its promise as a platform to support and extend conversations. I know this isn't news to those of us who have been ultra-connected for the last 10 years, but its emergence recently to a larger audience is very interesting in several ways.
The ability to instantly create and share is shattering the notions many institutions have built their teaching and learning models on. The emergence of the social web has jump started discussions around open learning, engaged communities of practice, Creative Commons, and so much more. This focus is bringing into question our reliance on closed tools to support teaching and learning practice. Faculty and students alike are interested in participating easily inside the academy just like they can outside in a place like Facebook. It is a frustrating world we live in and I am not sure we are paying close enough attention.
Lately I have been spending a lot of time talking to people in the newspaper industry to help them understand our students and what they mean to their continuously downward trending subscription rates. One thing is certain, they are afraid. They are obviously fighting for their lives in an industry where there seems to be few answers. I talk with them about how important it is to embrace new practices and models, to rethink the role of the traditional publication, and to look at trends across the social web that can be superimposed on their space. The announcement that The Christian Science Monitor will go to a totally online newspaper has brought new focus on the inevitable need to rethink existing practice and embrace a more open model of publication. Clearly circulation is plummeting for all sorts of reasons, but the short sighted lack of acceptance of the social web is a major factor in my mind.
At the same time, other media industries are actually starting to get it. For the longest time many of them have either ignored the power of the web or dismissed it as the land of the criminal. It appears that some of them are starting to see that there is huge potential for letting people participate. The lessons from a space like youtube.com 1 has not only transformed the ease with which one can publish online, it has totally shattered the notions of presence, conversation, and ownership. The fact that I can easily, with a couple of clicks, publish video with a global audience that can be instantly mashed up, commented on, and embedded in any website on the planet is pretty staggering. The fact that big media has ignored this opportunity is, to me, even more astonishing.
My problem with this is that I believe higher education is further behind accepting these simple facts.
The best example of big media getting it I can point to is the emergence of hulu.com 2 as a real player in the online TV distribution world. Not only can I do almost all of my TV watching online for free, but I am now able to do something that I never thought I'd see from the likes of NBC - embed real TV content on my own site legally. Not only do they give you the simplicity of the embed tags, but they even let one embed custom versions of the content. If I only want to point to 30 seconds of a Saturday Night Live piece, I can do that. With this simple affordance, the future of personalized media just took another step forward. Where are the tools for education that take advantage and promote these ideas?
Imagine what that does to student expectations? If a student can control NBC, why in their mind can't a faculty member respond to email on her terms? The future is happening right in front of us. I think it creates some interesting questions for our course and learning management systems, our policies, and our responsibility to promote open access to content. With the rise of blogs, with easily embedable media, and the explosion of point and click user-generated content what should the new tools look like for teaching and learning?
I have, for the most part, abandoned the notion of the walled garden as the assignment dumping ground via CMS drop boxes and have instead fully embraced the concepts of student centered creation. As we attempt to drive more students towards portfolio thinking via open platforms, what will it look like to turn an assignment in? Should we be rethinking a model built around aggregation that allows content to be “owned” by the creator and more easily shared to the faculty and the learning community? What does it mean for life long learning and an ability to connect with a broad community? How is moving towards a distributed set of resources that are easily reused going to challenge our control over curriculum? These are just some of the questions I am asking my administration and staff. People wonder if the print media folks are listening . . . I am more concerned if we are paying attention as well.
I'd love to hear thoughts.
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