Philipp: Is there utter confusion in the chat room? No? Tech assistant: meta.mako@gmail, didn't we have that?
Phillip: You've got to click hangout, you can also send them the url. Why don't you send them the url, just copy
it from the other window. Copy the url, then send it to them on skype. Ok. Tech assistant: This will be nice if we can
get them into the hangout then go. Philipp: I think I'm going to get started while you're adding them, we have
about 5 minutes. I already started it, can you get the room video onto the stream please, if its not already?
Is the room video on the livestream? Ok cool. Tech assistant: He says ok. Philipp: Just check that the live hangout is
working please. Maybe tell the chatroom people to refresh. Ok, I think I'm going to get started here. Can you do
this quietly on the side? So the theme for today is open learning and actually I'm very glad that the two people
who are joining us have finally managed to join us. Its Audrey Watters and Benjamin Mako Hill. I'm not going
to introduce them in a lot of detail, they're going to have a chance to speak about themselves a little bit and
their work in a second. But I'm very pleased that they were able to join us because on one hand I found them
to be incredibly insightful and interesting observers and practictioners of open learning. And they've been looking
at the space for a long time, I think they understand the dynamics better than most other people in this space. And
at the same time, they come at this with a very strong foundation of values and principles, which I think in the
current, technology driven, open education discussion is sometimes something we're not paying enough attention
to. Having these two join us today is great. And also I consider them friends so its nice to see you guys although
you're not here with us. I was a little worried that having the three of us talking about open learning, we
would agree too much and that would be boring. So I am going to try to play more of a facilitator, moderator role
and maybe ask some of the questions that I normally wouldn't be asking or I'd rather be answering to try to keep
the discussion interesting. And also my typical day job role of being open learnings biggest fan. So for the conversation
I hope we can keep it kind of loose and free ranging and kind of go where your interests take us. Also take
some questions from the room and the online community. And maybe focus specifically on concrete work
that you've done or that you've studied or that you've looked at and find interesting. So there are a lot of big ideas
in some of the readings and I think its always useful to tie it back to actual work that people are doing and I think
that both of you have such a wealth of experience, that would be interesting. So before we start I'm just going
to run through a couple of slides, I sent you guys the slides beforehand, its a little bit of housekeeping and looking
at what happened last week and also connecting it back to the online community. In terms of logistics, you are
here live in a room with about fifteen students who are taking the course at MIT and then we're streaming it live
online and there are probably about 100, 150 people watching it live and then a few thousand people will watch
the video over the next few days. So there is a much broader audience than just the people here. So these are
the people who are joining us who can't be here today in person. I think its interesting that last week, I was wearing
a suit and tie and I was at an event just across the hall and I was by far the edgiest person on the panel despite
the fact that I wore a suit and tie. And today I'm wearing a sweater and jeans and I'm by far the least edgy
person in this panel. So I think thats interesting that the open learning space kind of tends in that direction anyways.
I'm not going to say much about open learning, I'm going to let them speak about it. I found this picture of Audrey
at a conference and I had to use it because I think it demonstrates a few things. One is that the open learning
people are not huge fans of the traditional classroom instruction and also that she has an incredibly, I think this
is the iconic forced smile of the formal student that we all know so well sitting in a formal education environment.
Audrey: In the back of the room. Philipp: Exactly, in the back of the room, and probably doing things on your laptop that
have nothing to do with the session. So a quick rundown, a quick summary of what happened last week.
We actually had an online activity where we asked people to teach and learn from eachother and there were some
amazing examples of what happened in the overall community. So I've just picked out a few of them as
examples of the wide range of things that people offered and taught. And I got to see a few of you come to life
from Kindergarten and Learn, actually I think Korean, so theres an interesting connection to Korean, and some people
were doing calligraphy I think or geometric patterns, so interesting things. And the online community experimented
with a whole range of different tools. Lots of them used google hangouts and kind of self organized, so it was
nice to see it. Just some of my favorite examples of what people came up with include: Some of my favorite tricks for
amusing children in restaurants and other venues of Extreme Waiting, which I think is a course thats going to
run, with a lot of people for a long time. And then maybe the most kind of radical was Stage Combat including how
to throw a good fake punch. And they posted a youtube video actually of how the session went and its quite
amazing. And one of the interesting comments, thoughtful comments about the experience that I wanted to
pick out is that one person reflected on the courage it takes to do these kind of offering to teach someone something
or signing up. I think that relates nicely to open learning because when we're doing all these things in an open
space, I think its sometimes easy to forget it does take courage to fail publicly or ask a question in front of
thousands of people and so I thought this was an interesting comment and also a great response from Arne
who said it also took him courage as well. He felt like the worst case that could happen is a bunch of strangers
would think he's a nut and the best case is he'd have a bunch of new friends. So low risk, high potential and then
go and a big smiley face. And then Simon Fogg whose now I think its now the second week in a row that Simons
made it to the summary, and I thought just a good example for participants embracing the ethos of experimentation.
He tried a google hangout that he organized for the first time himself and it was a big learning experience for
him and we are constantly doing the same thing and its great to see that not only we get to play around with new
tools and technology and break things as we see happened today but also people who participate in the course
are doing the same and I think thats great to see. A quick note about whats happening with the backchannel
chat. Because there are a lot of improvements and new ideas that we're implementing today. One is we have better
video integration hopefully, where you can move the video window around, you can make it smaller, larger so it
doesn't interfere with the chat so much. We have automated logs now so people will be able to review
the conversation afterwards and we're thinking about some interesting analytics. We're also breaking people
into smaller groups so if you're in the chat right now you will have noticed that you are in a smaller group than you
usually are and there are three of them I think. This is kind of an experiment to see if we can get more in depth
conversations going rather than having this firehose of hundreds of people speaking at the same time. So
something we had in mind but probably not going to do because of the problems we had in the beginning, was
to do a break-out activity but we'll see how the rest of the session goes. And finally last week we did a midweek chat
where I think about forty people logged in to the chat and discussed what was going on in that week and asked
questions. We had almost the same amount of conversation we had with almost 200 people or 250 people during
the live sessions. But we're not sure exactly where we should go with the midweek chat, is that something we
should do every week or do people maybe want to run their own chats? So we're kind of looking for some ideas
from the community. And I also wanted to point out, to give a shout out to Drew Harry whose been the person
behind a lot of the chat improvements and setting up the backchannel chat and whose really got some exciting
ideas where that could go. He hasn't been in the room here and he hasn't been in the live sessions so I thought
we could say thank you Drew and you should follow him on twitter, he's doing really interesting work in this
space. And then the final announcement is this week for the first time we're going to do a rebroadcast. So a lot
of people tune into the live session and then they can chat in the background. And then we thought for people in
different timezones where this time is difficult we could do a rebroadcast or maybe two rebroadcasts. We're going
to do one tomorrow, mainly for Europe which will happen at 6pm CET. And then we're hoping to still do one
for Asia but we're looking for someone to partner with who can definitely be awake at that time because we may
be sleeping. So without further ado, I'd love to jump into the discussion with Audrey and Mako and first of all
thank you very much for joining us and bearing with us through some of these technical details and problems we
had in the beginning and might even still be having. I'm seeing people frantically rearranging laptops around.
And I thought a good first question would be to ask you how you got interested in open learning and what your
trajectory is. And as you talk about that maybe also give us some insight on what your definition of open learning
is because there are lots of different aspects of open or people have lots of different understandings of open and
of learning. And I thought I could ask you guys to introduce yourselves by talking a little bit about your open learning
experiences and why don't we start with Audrey. And i know we've had lots of conversations around this stuff and
around the larger courses that are happening right now. Also theres one conversation about the diminishing value
of the crafts where people, theres a more standardized way of education and learning that people seem to be expected
to participate in and I think we were talking about carpentry or something and why isn't that more promoted or
appreciated pathway? I don't know if thats the direction you want to take, feel free to go in a totally different direction
maybe just kind of take it away for a couple of minutes and talk a little bit about your work and how it relates to
open learning. Audrey: So, my name's Audrey, I'm a education technology writer. And I've actually been
thinking about the way technology impact the way we teach and learn for a very long time. When I was a college student,
I actually dropped out of college and had a baby very young and ended up going back to school in the '90s under
what was then called distance education. And always thinking about the ways in which technology was very
helpful for folks like me who needed to have a different sort of access to learning resources. But it wasn't until I was
actually in graduate school much later that I started thinking about open learning particularly with the rise of
blogging and moving a lot of my conversations about not just what happened in the classroom but my own
explorations and my own place in the academic world, that I started to really think about the sorts of networks
I was able to develop and the ways in which I was able to practice this, my work, my research in a different setting
one that was more transparent than academia often allows graduate students to be. And I've been blogging
actively since around 2004 and for me thats the way in which I practice online. Some of it obviously has to do with
how I license my work, the way in which I share my work publicly but its also this notion of different sort
of transparency and a willingness to put ideas out there that might be half baked and engage in building networks
with people, sharing ideas with people, working around exploring ideas together on the web. So I feel as though
thats a very different way of thinking about learning than traditional classrooms, sort of higher ed as I was exposed
to it. I do think its been interesting to watch, someone who spends a lot of time looking at this new interest and excitement in learning online that might
much of what I see actually replicates behaviors that are still very traditional in the classroom. Its less about open
exploration and more about moving that lecture scenario into a web based one. I think theres a lot to be said
about inquiry driven, self driven, open connections that online learning offers that simply by having open
enrollment in online courses doesn't necessarily address. Philipp: Yeah and I definitely want to come back to that
point about whats going on right now. But Mako, over to you. So you have a wealth of things you could refer
back to but you shared a very interesting, very personal essay with me just a couple of days ago which I hadn't
read. I don't know if you want to reflect a little bit on that, kind of what you describe as unlearning and joining
this geek culture and relating it back to whats happening in learning and education today. Mako: Can you
hear me now? Is the mic working? So the essay that I shared is called The Geek Show Inherits the Earth or
something like that, my story of unlearning. The quick summary is that I grew up in, for a lot of reasons and in a lot
of ways not a huge fan of formal schooling as it was applied to me in particular. At the same time that I was
struggling in school in a lot of ways, I was really thriving in a set of communities around technology communities,
technology development communities. I initially when I was twelve years old started contributing to a bunch of free
software what a lot of people now would call open source, operating systems projects. I worked a lot on a project called the Debian Project
which is a pretty widely used operating system in the flavor of Linux. I was part of the founding team for
for the Ubuntu Project which is probably the most widely used Linux distribution.
And so thats a little bit out of order, but I've been working on free software for a long time, sort of had this
life that I would much rather be spending my time on than a lot of the things I doing learning in school. Whereas I was
learning an enormous amount of stuff producing software that by the time I ended up in college was used by
many millions of people. I finished high school early and moved to Ethiopia because my parents thought that
was a great idea. They liked the idea of us seeing the world and I came back to go to college at sort of an alternative
liberal arts school called Hampshire College which attempts to build an alternative approach to education and
to learning into the curriculum. No grades or tests that sort of thing. And I spent a lot of time at Hampshire and
subsequently I've basically, I've been in and out of school, I'm finishing my PH.D. now at MIT but I spent a lot
of time trying to reconcile both my sort of position in very traditional academic environments and a lot of my work in
in these free and open software communities where really many of my friends are and where a lot of types of things
in the world that I'm most proud of, have occurred. I think that I have worked in a few projects which are explicitly, what
I would consider open learning projects. I worked a bit with the One Laptop Per Child project. I really came to MIT
originally because the project was starting up and I wanted to get involved in some of the discussion about the software there. Although
a lot of communities that I work in are projects that aren't explicitly designed as learning projects, projects like Wikipedia,
Debian or a bunch of these free open software projects but I think enormous amount of learning takes place
in what I think are these wonderful environments where people can join and begin to participate and ramp up
and learn in that process. Thats the context in which I've tried to approach this and some of the ways in which I've
tried to bring these two worlds that I operate in, together. My research is about free and open source software communities
and involves work in a lot of these communities as well. Philipp: Yeah actually could you maybe give a short summary
of how these communities work, because not everyone may be as familiar, so without going into all the details?
But if you could do a quick summary of how does an open community like an open source software community
work, whats special about it? Mako: Theres lots of people who write pieces of software, we'll take an example
of pieces of software although people also create, try to apply similiar sorts of ideas to the other types of
knowledge products as well. One thing, I'll write a piece of software and what I'll do very often is, I'll write a piece
of software to solve a particular problem that I have. I then usually put a free license on it and put it either on my
website or on another hosting website like Github, one many people would use and then I'll invite other people
to come work with me on it. What happens the vast majority of time, no one really shows up. But sometimes
in a number of these projects are large communities people who are working together and collaborating on mailing lists and chat
channels. There are large numbers of people, the majority of whom are making smaller fixes like hey there
was a bug in this I wanted this to work in a different way, they can download the software, they can make a
change, they can share it back with the community. But sometimes people become much more involved, you end
up even with sometimes pretty complicated organizations. So the Debian project which is what I really
got involved in is the product of, now includes more than 30,000 distinct pieces of software, all sort of integrated
together. It involves somewhere around 5000 people who have explicit membership in the project, theres a
membership process, its a real community. I've travelled around the world, almost every city I go to I just look
up the list of local Debian developers. I'm going to be meeting up with some people, I'm here in Mainz in
Germany and meeting up with some Debian people while I'm here. Because theres a community of people who've
been working together, seen eachothers bugs, fixed eachothers bugs and through that process, we've developed
together an operating system which I'm running on my computer right now using it to talk to you and which
millions of other people are as well. So its a pretty cool process and community. Philipp: Well the process you've
just described as kind of putting things out that you've worked on and letting other people contribute or give you
critique actually sounds very similiar to what Audrey was talking about when she spoke about her blogging practice.
So I think theres an interesting question about how generalizable are these practices from open source
software communities to other areas of learning or other communities. I was wondering if actually there are
two directions we could take with this. One is, one thing thats special about open source software is that
everyone who participates in that community to some degree works on the same thing, theres one thing that
people are producing together and theres lots of little pieces that you can tackle there to work on this one thing.
Maybe in learning other things we don't have that one or maybe we do. And thats one question there, how
generalizable is that idea. The other one, the question that always comes up as well, this is for software people,
this is for technology people but is this going to work the same process for other areas of learning maybe the
humanities? And so maybe over to Audrey to just kind of riffing on this idea of how generalizable are these open
source software lessons to other areas? Audrey: I do think that some of this, I think as we take what we can from
open source communities, from software communities, some of this we have to think of in terms of metaphor. So
when I write something and if I were to post it and share it on Github theres sort of a different expectation about
what an essay does than what a piece of software does. An essay does not have to be executable in the same way
that a piece of software does. When we think about debugging an essay its a very different process, I would
think practically than debugging a software. You could say in some ways its the same way, do you have the semicolon
in the right place? But I think that when we're thinking about some of these things its actually about debugging
outside of software is interrogating, interrogating more than just does the code run and can we improve the code?
But I do think there are some really important and really valuable things that other fields can learn from open source
communities and part of it has to do with this notion of debugging and thinking about looking at things closely.
Thinking about how can we fork ideas and always give credit back to build better ways of giving credit back to
where ideas came from. And also sort of this notion of remembering to license things openly. I've been
experimenting with putting some of my work up on Github as well and I think there are a lot of interesting
ideas that we can learn from it. And there are a lot of things that we do in learning that I think we could make
better use of some of the tools that have been built around something like Github, to be able to track changes,
to have a more transparent way of filing and managing issues around our learning and not just around our code. Philipp: Yes
maybe just a quick note for those who may not be aware of what Github is. Its a source code repository where you if
you're writing software could store your source code and then it was very easy for other people to make a copy
of that source code to work on it for yourself and send back requests for improvements. So people would fork
software projects. Maybe one of the more interesting things about it, is that it then spawned this huge community
of collaboration where people would be working on eachothers software projects, change requests and it
has grown to, if you were a software developer today, you'd kind of have to be on Github almost to be active
in the community. So Mako, kind of continuing with how generalizable are these lessons for non-software
learning communities. I know that you've worked on kind of governance/community practices and guidelines
and I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about what you wanted to achieve in the open source community
and then think about would that be a good model for more non-software learning communities? Mako: I would say
first that the primary, the reason that I became involved with working in these software communities
was primarily because there was set of principled statements about why software should be free. And
the argument basically was two-fold. It said that it was important that software was free so that we could share
it and that anyone who wanted a piece of software could have it because of course if I write a piece of software
I can give it to everyone for the same cost that I give it to any single person. So one argument was that we think
that sharing is good and that there is to some degree, an ethical imperative to share when we can so we should
do it. And the second point was that software should be under the control of the users because the software
that I choose to use mediates my experience of the world, I'm limited in my ability to communicate to you by
decisions made by the team that wrote the software that I'm using to communicate with you all now, hopefully.
Mostly successfully. And those people who, the technology designers, the people who are implementing
the technology have an enormous amount of power over all the people who use the technology. They are
determining to some degree what I can say or how I can say it, who I can say it to. And so free software was
a statement, I think most importantly about, who should be able to control their experience of the world.
Because the argument went our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by technology. So I think that
from the perspective, from this principled level, I think the principles apply very clearly to thinking about learning
or education because I think to the extent of our experience of the world is mediated by the ways in which
we learn that the questions about how we learn and when we can learn should be under control of the learners.
From a principled perspective, I think that things translate very well. The main argument in favor of free software
, the reason that I decided to work on this stuff and lots of other people did as well, I think this is something that
applies very well. In terms of the organizational forms or the particular tactics or even the particular tools like Github
I think theres a sense in which, talking about the degree to which Github applies or doesn't apply, and I think in
some ways it could work effectively for something and in other ways its less good. I think that terms of what Audrey
mentioned in terms of questions of bug fixing. I think of work sometimes, I sometimes divide them into works
that are functional and works that are less functional because its very easy to imagine submitting a bug fix to
something like an encyclopedia article and in fact people do it all the time because there are things that are sometimes clearly
wrong, sometimes its a little more difficult to understand what might be right or the most right thing in a
particular context. But I think that even that conversation is something that happens a lot in the case of software very often.
I think software is actually the.., as someone whose spent a lot of time writing software, I think the question of
what is or is not clearly a bug is something people will spend an enormous amount of time talking about. And
I think thats a useful conversation that teaches people a lot about how we can learn a lot about it. But I think there
are lots of lessons in terms of the particular tools and terms of the particular processes and forms of organization
Wikipedia was explicitly inspired by the free software movement, it used licenses and tools which were
modelled after things which had happened, which had been built and used in software development for a long time.
I have a lot of , I think that we can look around the world and see lots of places that we can learn from but
I think theres lots to be learned in a bunch of different ways. Audrey: I think that theres something as well about this
notion of software in particular, proprietary software thats increasingly that you are unable to crack it open and
look at it and it truly is a black box. For me, thats the opposite of what, thats the absolute antithesis of what we
want learning to be. We want learning to be, we want to be able to hack it open and take a look at whether or not
we're talking about our own processes or the subjects that we might be learning about. We do want to be able to
crack it open, study how it works, look at all of the pieces and figure it out at sort of a fundamental level, back
to use the analogy, back to the level of the code. So I think theres a lot to think about. How does open source have
a different way of us thinking about software that moves away from this black box that you don't want to know
in that scenario, you don't get to know how it functions, you're just supposed to know that it works.
And so I think its important in learning that you don't just get this received knowledge that you're supposed to nod
and say, oh yes this is the way it works, of course it does because it appeared in my text or my professor told
me that this was the truth. As learners we should be allowed to crack things open and look more deeply. So I think the
open source model , openly licensed tools, things that let us dive in rather than stand back and consume are
incredibily important. Mako: I totally agree with that and I think the..., but also become a producer of the stuff. Audrey:
Yes. Mako: The metaphor that I sometimes use is imagine a world where we taught everyone to read but
not to write. And thats the world we live in, in regards to lots of different kinds of technology and software where
people don't have the ability, the can learn but they can't change it. I think thats a , you can imagine what
the implications to like democracy would be. Its pretty striking. Philipp: Thanks, whats very interesting to me is
hearing you talk about it. One of the articles we read this week was Illich's Learning Webs chapter from
Deschooling Society. And a lot of things you just mentioned, you don't want the world to be a black box. You
want to be able to tinker with it and look under the hood. He wrote about the Web of Things and had this fantastic
idea where could you go anywhere, any building, any person, look under their hood and say, how does that work?
I think theres a certain attitude in the open source world where people actually expect the world to work like that.
And sometimes even when the law or other limitations make that harder, we try to find ways around it. And then also
I think that theres a very strong notion of agency that I'm hearing in your remarks where its not only that we
should place limits on who controls access to learning and education but also that the people who are the learners
should be able to choose how they want to participate, first of all we shouldn't limit who can participate as much as
possible but then also how they want to participate is a question that we don't ask enough in formal education. So
it kind of leads me to a transition into a topic thats come up in the last few weeks again and again. In this course we
often talk about very interesting and compelling ideas for how learning can take place and we find examples for
it but often, it hasn't really changed the institutions in which most of the learning still happens. Theres often a question
about, "I'm convinced this is a good idea, but how do I make my school do this or how do I make my university
do this?" And I think we should spend some time talking about this broadly. The question to tie it up would be,
there is a very strong notion of activism in both of your backgrounds and works and there is certainly this kind of,
a little bit us vs them feeling and controlling these things on the fringes. I think thats been very useful because
its given us an identity, it creates a community of people who believe in the same things. But I'm wondering
whats the next phase in this. Will we have to be the alternative or is there a way to infuse the system with some
more of this activism? ...... I know I know either of you please. Audrey: I think that we're starting to see some
pretty interesting things particularly around push back around open access in publications, thats definitely
something thats connected to institutional power. Your success as a professor sort of deeply intertwined
professionally with your ability to publish, so how can professors help leverage and change the publishing, the
academic publishing industry to be more open access. So some of the walls, the barriers to be able to access that
knowledge come down. I think we're seeing that around the open data movement so that people are showing
their work and having anyone has the access to the data, the raw data that went into making various tools, or
making various decisions or doing research. I think the ways in which we're seeing openness permeate
institutions, government, universities, Science, I do think we're starting to see some movement forward but I'm
not sure, I do think that even in those cases all of that work feels very much like activism and it does feel like
you're having to agitate for pretty substantial changes in which these processes and institutions and business
models have worked up until now. Philipp: Mako maybe just sort of tee off for you, why don't you say a few words
about where you're headed because I know you're moving into a more formal academic setting and how is
the open source activist going to be the professor of the future? Mako: I have a couple of ways to answer that. The first is to say
I think that we've made enormous progress, I'm not an old guy yet but I'm now no longer, I'm 32 years old. Philipp: Thanks for clarifying that. But I've been
working in this space for now 28 years in free software and we've made so much progress. When I was a kid starting
out in this space just in terms of software you couldn't, it ran on almost no hardware, it crashed all the time, it was
super buggy, it had no feature. I'm running an operating system which is almost entirely free software, my phone
runs free software, your phone probably runs free software unless you have an iphone. And yes is it the world that
I had envisioned in every detail, no of course not. There are lots of ways in which lots of things have taken turns
for what I think the worst but I think we've made important progress. The second point is that I want to continue
to be the idealist. Yeah, I see lots and lots of ways in which we can, we want to make things better and I want
to stake out that ground. Other people will make the compromises necessary to put the stuff on my
phone, maybe my constitution is the activist constitution and thats something which I want my world to be the crazy
not just saying that things are not good enough, but showing or trying to build examples of how it can be
better. And I hope that I never live to feel that things couldn't be better because they just worked out already.
I think that means that I've lost my imagination or something. I think that that said theres all kinds of
structural limitations that cause one to even in my own work not be able to live up to my own expectations. I can't
as I teach, you know I'm going to be at the University of Washington teaching, starting next year and I'll be teaching
classes at a state university and theres all kinds of ways of running classes. I want to say everyone gets an A in the
class today, if you never want to come back again, great, if you do maybe we could teach eachother something.
I haven't talked about it to the head of the department yet but I guess there will have to be some compromise
between that position and whatever else I'm going to work out. But I think that the fact that we have to
compromise or settle does not mean that we can't move the needle. And I hope to be pushing hard on that
needle for the rest of my life. And I think if theres enough of us doing it we can make real progress and I've seen
enough success in projects that I've seen in areas that I've worked on in relation to software, in relation, for example
encyclopedias which are now freely available. Theres so much great free and open stuff now that didn't exist 20 years
ago. If we can accomplish as much, even if its only the, even if we accomplish as much, I'll be happy. If we can
support the first derivative as well that would be even better. I don't know, I'm optimistic and I try to compromise
as little as possible. Thats my answer. Philipp: Good, I think one thing that has been happening in the last year or so is that more
and more institutions are at least talking about experimenting with open learning and open education.
The example are these MOOCs which is an acronym that stands for Massive Open Online Courses, its even got
open in the name of the thing whatever that thing is. And I think for many institutions they really do feel like this is a big
experiment, this is a way of opening up access to the institution. I know Audrey has been writing and thinking
about this quite a bit and I wanted to together reflect a little on are these open courses examples for the kind of open
learning that we have in mind, or that you have been thinking about? Or where do they fall short and what are
some of the things you find interesting about them? What are some of the things you'd like to see them do
differently? Audrey: I think its really interesting to me particularly as Mako was saying we are living in a
world now where there are so many interesting and powerful open projects that I'm seeing many, I'm seeing open become a
word that is a bit like green washing, that as long as you slap natural on the label of your food, of course its
healthy and good for you. So I do think we still need to interrogate what we mean by open and I think that its
incredibly important that these classes are open enrollment. I think that letting anyone who wants to participate
in an online class, sign up, check it out for free is huge particularly in light of the high cost of college tuition. I
think this is incredibly significant and I don't want to diminish that at all. I think that those of us that are trying
to push these conversations forward, I think that we do need to ask other questions like is this sufficient, is open
enrollment sufficiently open, are these classes using openly licensed work? Do these classes live on the open web?
Are people in these classes able to form their own learning communities? And to use a technical term, to fork
the ideas that are happening in the lecture and then run down and build their own, go down their own learning
path? I think theres a lot of what I would consider open learning that I tend not to see in these MOOCs that are really in some ways
an online version of the massive lecture hall in which the professor is still the person who has, purportedly, who has
all the knowledge and is there to fill the student's brains with what they need to know in order to pass the
multiple choice tests every 15 minutes. I think we need to push the boundaries still for MOOCs, I think they're great
first step in terms of access. But I'm not sure that thats my vision of what open learning looks like. Philipp: Mako
I don't know if you've looked at these open courses a lot or if you've got thoughts on this? Mako: Yes, I think
that for me the most transformative learning experiences have been the ones outside the context of courses.
I've had some great transformative courses but I think that, I've never taken a programming course, yes thats true
I've worked in operating system projects for a long time, I've learned in communities where I wanted to do things
and had to, I looked in books, I looked at some type of course or teaching materials but mostly I learned from
working with people, being exposed to code written by people that were better than I was, for example. I sort of
half took one, I was one of those people who was curious, so I signed up for one and then dropped out half way
in the middle, I guess like many people. I thought it was interesting and exciting. I totally agree with Audrey, this
idea of theres a lot of important questions, that a lot of people at the moment are struggling with and I think even
fighting over what open enough is or what it means. I think thats a great opportunity for all of us who have
strong feelings about this to come in and help answer that. To think hard about what we think open enough is and sort
of draw a line in the sand. Philipp: I think we have a question from the back channel or from the room.
Mitch: One question in the back channel is around the idea of debugging, Susan VG started the conversation
in the back channel when Mako was talking about debugging software. Then a discussion about debugging
ideas and how can we draw that idea of debugging to all sorts of different things in open learning. Not just
thinking debugging the thing, but debugging our own thinking, so maybe they could reflect somewhat on b
broader ways of thinking about debugging and open learning? Audrey: I think debugging is a very important
thing in terms of our own learning and in terms of sharing our ideas with others. Its not necessarily a way in
which we often frame problem solving but I think it is a very interesting way to do so. Its something that as a writer,
someone who spends a lot of time writing, i taught writing for a number of ways as well. Thinking about the way
in which the logic for example of an argument works is something that you can think about in terms of debugging
because of the logical steps of an argument do require certain perhaps not the same level of ability to run a
program would but theres still has to be some process by which part A connects to part B and that leads you to part
C. So I think debugging is a really useful concept and its useful for I think students for their own processes as
well. Define when they stumble, define places where the idea just doesn't execute correctly or efficiently. Mako:
Yeah, I agree. Debugging is one of these metaphors that is something that I use like in reference to not software
all the time. Its one little piece of that software developer me that has come in and thought about other
places as well. I think its more about the process, the idea of ok lets think about after this step whats the state
as a way of breaking down certain types of problems in the way of undressing. I think its really useful. Theres a
bunch of interesting things, thinking about patterns, I'm doing the same kind of thing here and here and here
maybe I could think about whats the sort of abstract thing being used here? Also a lot of interesting tools. I also
think its limiting that there are lots of, not everything can be easily expressed as a bug, a lot of things are just
sort of nested or a matter of taste or fuzzier, they're less clearly wrong and so less clearly thought about in terms
of bugs or debugging. But I do think its a very useful process. I also like the idea, this is something that
applied to the way that I write for example in general, make the first path and go back and try to find the ways in which
things don't work, identify issues or bugs and then sort of address them. Philipp: Yes, we have another...just one
quick comment as you were talking about it, you reminded me of in formal education, you learn something,
you write a test at the end, you get the results, you move on, theres no time for debugging. And debugging
is considered something you wouldn't do in education. Either you've learned it or you haven't and the reality is you
move on to the next thing. The reality is that, this course is an example of an experiment that gets debugged as we go along.
And often things go wrong but its often the best way to learn, to push yourself to the point where maybe things
will break and then debug them with the other people and I think its a skill that we are still learning because
when you're about to start the broadcast and the audio isn't working it freaks you out, its nervewrecking but in a way
its more exciting to learn that way than to sit in a room with no audience and play around with the software. But anyway
theres another question here from the online community. Ricarose: So this question is from TL2 and they're
asking if the panelists have any advice for a classroom teacher, how they can advance open learning in these
settings? Audrey: With classroom teachers with students, I think that part of it has to be moving towards a more
collaborative environment. I think theres something about traditional schooling in which we're taught as though the teacher
the textbook and although we're sitting in a classroom full of other learners, its somehow our learning is our own and
happens in isolation. I think that learning to work together, learning to debug and trouble shoot, solve problems
together, to me is the first step in openness, to be able to lay out your thinking in front of others and bounce ideas
off of one another. I think moving away from this isolated, individual, being forced to learn alone, is really the
first step towards openness. Knowing that we always learn together, we always learn socially, we work
collaboratively, as humans we should help make
learning look more like that rather than expect students to stumble through things in isolation. Mako: I would totally
echo that. So one thing that I found very effective, is doing my work in these, not just outside the individual but
within a group but out in the internet in these public spaces, it depends a little bit on the classroom but its often
very possible to encourage the students not just to document for themselves or for the classroom but to do
it in Wikipedia or a wiki on a particular subject and not to just throw it out there as a lot of people do but to engage
with other editors, people in the site, to do that. Its possible to if you're writing stuff in Scratch to upload those things to
the Scratch online community, if you're writing software to upload it into Github or something else. In some cases
people are going to come back, they're going to work on it, they're going to make comments and that sort of
engagement out in the world can lead to both the creation of these communities but also a kind of, I think when
people know their stuff is going to be public, they often treat it differently then they would otherwise in ways that
are good and in ways that are less good. I think that at least for some large sort of work its the kind of thing that you
can think about applying in classrooms right now which lots of classrooms are already doing in various ways.
In terms of these existing communities, encouraging people to get involved and put their stuff out there and try to
contribute to something that is not just directly useful to a lot of people but directly useful to, really useful to the
learning process itself. Audrey: I think that ties back to something you were saying earlier as well that we want to
really help students become not just the consumers of knowledge but also producers and creators of knowledge
themselves. So when you help students contribute to learning communities, contribute online, they recognize
that they have a stake in the creation and construction of knowledge that they really aren't
just these receptacles to have their brains filled up with other peoples stuff. I think that thats incredibly powerful that we want
people to feel that they can build and make not just consume things. Mako: And I think that so much energy
and effort goes into producing assignments which are then read by the teacher, just sort of put to the side. And
people learn in the process so that can be useful. But I think that in so many of these examples, there are people
who would love to really have problems that they want solved. Wikipedia, the vast majority of content in
Wikipedia doesn't exist in any language other than English. People would love a poor translation even done by
someone who was learning and they might be able to fix it up and if you stay involved you could learn in that
process, is just one example. Philipp: Do you want to skip that? We're running a little bit.. Mitch: There's a few more
questions but maybe we can ask Mako and Audrey to answer them online, we'll post them online and try
to get them engaged in the discussion in the Google + community. Philipp: That would be great and we're happy to
point you to the right places and maybe summarize them. That would actually be a perfect example also for the open
learning communities we've been speaking about. We have to wrap up but I have a last question to you guys and then we're going to talk a little
bit about logistics. And that is, people, a lot of the responses that I often hear when we talk about these open
learning ideas is well this works for some people and that group is sometimes even described as an elite. Its not
the old elite who went to all the right schools necessarily but it is, both of you have very compelling personal stories
and you've been very resourceful and you've had strong interests and you've followed your passions. So I think
some people may feel, how can I apply those practices to my own life? And I think it would be great if maybe you
could say a few sentences about, is this a new elite or is this something fairly easy to pick up by anyone? And kind
of apply to their own situations? This is the part where I'm looking for an inspiring closing remarks. Audrey: I think
that they don't work for everyone. I think if we can be make learning be passion based, if it can be inquiry based
if we can encourage curiosity we might not have students solving a whole new legion of math worksheets
but maybe we'd have them work on some pretty cool, things that really authentically drive their own learning forward.
I do think optimizing for passion, optimizing for curiosity are the whim here. And I think, I recognize there
are certainly barriers to doing that, there are lots of barriers to doing that online even. But I do think that finding what interests you
particularly for young learners and going with that is an incredibly empowering first start and its something that
schooling tends not to do. Mako: And I think that not everyone is going to become a Debian developer, not
everyone is going to work on the kinds of projects that I've worked on and I think thats great. Because theres a world
of other stuff which is not being done at all and is really important. Theres a bunch of really great projects
going around to seniors and helping provide a little bit of information to them on how they can contribute to
Wikipedia for example so that they can document their own experiences in their lives in their towns and villages and
spaces. Its been enormously useful to them and transformative to them that they are able to do this. And its
really great for the rest of the world that gets access to all this really great information. There are huge, I think that
whats necessary is more just, everyone has skills and interests which other people want enormously at any
given point and I think could benefit from that. I think that those of us who've been, and I count myself as one of
them, who've been building tools to support this kind of work have historically focused on the kinds of things that
are useful to them. So as a software developer I spent a lot of time writing tools that are often useful for other software
developers. And I think that if we spent 10% as much time building tools for great documentation of, or collaboration
around articles of fashion or clothing, we would have so much more work in that space. Thats just an example
of something that I think has been relatively underserved in these communities as compared to software. But I
think you can just look around and I see that theres a world of opportunity and I think that this is only going to get
broader and only going to get bigger and no one has any excuse anymore. Philipp: Thank you both for participating
and tuning in from, actually Makos in Berlin, Audrey is in California, we're all over the world here, and sharing
your stories and your thoughts on this. There are a couple of more slides about next week. I'm going to hand over
to Mitch or Ricarose. I've also got the remix slide so maybe, do you want to? Ricarose: So next week we'll have
the theme will be Social Creativity and we'll have Gerard Fischer and Andres Monroy Hernandez with us.
For the activity next week, we're going to do another activity with Scratch, we're going to do a remixing
activity. As you can see there is a project page in Scratch website, scratch.mit.edu and we'll ask you to explore
some of their projects there and find a project that you think is interesting and you can download it and look at the
code and remix it. So you can build upon this project and we'd like you to share it again on this Scratch website and
in the project notes share what you changed and also remember to give credit. Is there anything else? Philipp: No
thats it so thanks for participating, thanks to you guys again, thanks to the online community and for those who
who are, for whom this time didn't work maybe we'll see you tomorrow for the rebroadcast of the session.