WEBVTT 00:00:10.738 --> 00:00:39.070 Philipp: Is there utter confusion in the chat room? No? Tech assistant: meta.mako@gmail, didn't we have that? 00:00:39.070 --> 00:00:54.404 Phillip: You've got to click hangout, you can also send them the url. Why don't you send them the url, just copy 00:00:54.404 --> 00:01:09.205 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 00:01:09.205 --> 00:01:11.470 get them into the hangout then go. Philipp: I think I'm going to get started while you're adding them, we have 00:01:11.470 --> 00:01:16.237 about 5 minutes. I already started it, can you get the room video onto the stream please, if its not already? 00:01:26.470 --> 00:02:01.104 Is the room video on the livestream? Ok cool. Tech assistant: He says ok. Philipp: Just check that the live hangout is 00:02:01.104 --> 00:02:24.605 working please. Maybe tell the chatroom people to refresh. Ok, I think I'm going to get started here. Can you do 00:02:24.605 --> 00:02:35.404 this quietly on the side? So the theme for today is open learning and actually I'm very glad that the two people 00:02:35.404 --> 00:02:44.470 who are joining us have finally managed to join us. Its Audrey Watters and Benjamin Mako Hill. I'm not going 00:02:44.470 --> 00:02:49.538 to introduce them in a lot of detail, they're going to have a chance to speak about themselves a little bit and 00:02:49.538 --> 00:02:57.904 their work in a second. But I'm very pleased that they were able to join us because on one hand I found them 00:02:57.904 --> 00:03:06.871 to be incredibly insightful and interesting observers and practictioners of open learning. And they've been looking 00:03:06.871 --> 00:03:13.069 at the space for a long time, I think they understand the dynamics better than most other people in this space. And 00:03:13.069 --> 00:03:20.870 at the same time, they come at this with a very strong foundation of values and principles, which I think in the 00:03:20.870 --> 00:03:27.271 current, technology driven, open education discussion is sometimes something we're not paying enough attention 00:03:27.271 --> 00:03:35.605 to. Having these two join us today is great. And also I consider them friends so its nice to see you guys although 00:03:35.605 --> 00:03:42.737 you're not here with us. I was a little worried that having the three of us talking about open learning, we 00:03:42.737 --> 00:03:50.302 would agree too much and that would be boring. So I am going to try to play more of a facilitator, moderator role 00:03:50.302 --> 00:03:57.905 and maybe ask some of the questions that I normally wouldn't be asking or I'd rather be answering to try to keep 00:03:57.905 --> 00:04:10.036 the discussion interesting. And also my typical day job role of being open learnings biggest fan. So for the conversation 00:04:10.036 --> 00:04:16.522 I hope we can keep it kind of loose and free ranging and kind of go where your interests take us. Also take 00:04:16.522 --> 00:04:25.538 some questions from the room and the online community. And maybe focus specifically on concrete work 00:04:25.538 --> 00:04:31.870 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 00:04:31.870 --> 00:04:38.437 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 00:04:38.437 --> 00:04:45.637 that both of you have such a wealth of experience, that would be interesting. So before we start I'm just going 00:04:45.637 --> 00:04:51.769 to run through a couple of slides, I sent you guys the slides beforehand, its a little bit of housekeeping and looking 00:04:51.769 --> 00:05:00.038 at what happened last week and also connecting it back to the online community. In terms of logistics, you are 00:05:00.038 --> 00:05:09.037 here live in a room with about fifteen students who are taking the course at MIT and then we're streaming it live 00:05:09.037 --> 00:05:15.188 online and there are probably about 100, 150 people watching it live and then a few thousand people will watch 00:05:15.188 --> 00:05:22.971 the video over the next few days. So there is a much broader audience than just the people here. So these are 00:05:22.971 --> 00:05:29.637 the people who are joining us who can't be here today in person. I think its interesting that last week, I was wearing 00:05:29.637 --> 00:05:36.871 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 00:05:36.871 --> 00:05:43.204 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 00:05:43.204 --> 00:05:52.871 person in this panel. So I think thats interesting that the open learning space kind of tends in that direction anyways. 00:05:52.871 --> 00:05:59.139 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 00:05:59.139 --> 00:06:06.270 at a conference and I had to use it because I think it demonstrates a few things. One is that the open learning 00:06:06.270 --> 00:06:15.070 people are not huge fans of the traditional classroom instruction and also that she has an incredibly, I think this 00:06:15.070 --> 00:06:25.106 is the iconic forced smile of the formal student that we all know so well sitting in a formal education environment. 00:06:25.106 --> 00:06:30.638 Audrey: In the back of the room. Philipp: Exactly, in the back of the room, and probably doing things on your laptop that 00:06:30.638 --> 00:06:39.305 have nothing to do with the session. So a quick rundown, a quick summary of what happened last week. 00:06:39.305 --> 00:06:46.605 We actually had an online activity where we asked people to teach and learn from eachother and there were some 00:06:46.605 --> 00:06:54.570 amazing examples of what happened in the overall community. So I've just picked out a few of them as 00:06:54.570 --> 00:07:00.805 examples of the wide range of things that people offered and taught. And I got to see a few of you come to life 00:07:00.805 --> 00:07:08.937 from Kindergarten and Learn, actually I think Korean, so theres an interesting connection to Korean, and some people 00:07:08.937 --> 00:07:19.705 were doing calligraphy I think or geometric patterns, so interesting things. And the online community experimented 00:07:19.705 --> 00:07:25.870 with a whole range of different tools. Lots of them used google hangouts and kind of self organized, so it was 00:07:25.870 --> 00:07:33.522 nice to see it. Just some of my favorite examples of what people came up with include: Some of my favorite tricks for 00:07:33.522 --> 00:07:39.770 amusing children in restaurants and other venues of Extreme Waiting, which I think is a course thats going to 00:07:39.770 --> 00:07:48.689 run, with a lot of people for a long time. And then maybe the most kind of radical was Stage Combat including how 00:07:48.689 --> 00:07:57.037 to throw a good fake punch. And they posted a youtube video actually of how the session went and its quite 00:07:57.037 --> 00:08:03.906 amazing. And one of the interesting comments, thoughtful comments about the experience that I wanted to 00:08:03.906 --> 00:08:13.705 pick out is that one person reflected on the courage it takes to do these kind of offering to teach someone something 00:08:13.705 --> 00:08:20.070 or signing up. I think that relates nicely to open learning because when we're doing all these things in an open 00:08:20.070 --> 00:08:28.604 space, I think its sometimes easy to forget it does take courage to fail publicly or ask a question in front of 00:08:28.604 --> 00:08:35.436 thousands of people and so I thought this was an interesting comment and also a great response from Arne 00:08:35.436 --> 00:08:42.838 who said it also took him courage as well. He felt like the worst case that could happen is a bunch of strangers 00:08:42.838 --> 00:08:50.804 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 00:08:50.804 --> 00:08:58.204 go and a big smiley face. And then Simon Fogg whose now I think its now the second week in a row that Simons 00:08:58.204 --> 00:09:08.703 made it to the summary, and I thought just a good example for participants embracing the ethos of experimentation. 00:09:08.703 --> 00:09:14.240 He tried a google hangout that he organized for the first time himself and it was a big learning experience for 00:09:14.240 --> 00:09:21.505 him and we are constantly doing the same thing and its great to see that not only we get to play around with new 00:09:21.505 --> 00:09:27.604 tools and technology and break things as we see happened today but also people who participate in the course 00:09:27.604 --> 00:09:33.905 are doing the same and I think thats great to see. A quick note about whats happening with the backchannel 00:09:33.905 --> 00:09:41.689 chat. Because there are a lot of improvements and new ideas that we're implementing today. One is we have better 00:09:41.689 --> 00:09:45.537 video integration hopefully, where you can move the video window around, you can make it smaller, larger so it 00:09:45.537 --> 00:09:56.771 doesn't interfere with the chat so much. We have automated logs now so people will be able to review 00:09:56.771 --> 00:10:01.522 the conversation afterwards and we're thinking about some interesting analytics. We're also breaking people 00:10:01.522 --> 00:10:08.537 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 00:10:08.537 --> 00:10:13.705 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 00:10:13.705 --> 00:10:21.189 conversations going rather than having this firehose of hundreds of people speaking at the same time. So 00:10:21.189 --> 00:10:25.404 something we had in mind but probably not going to do because of the problems we had in the beginning, was 00:10:25.404 --> 00:10:33.171 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 00:10:33.171 --> 00:10:39.237 where I think about forty people logged in to the chat and discussed what was going on in that week and asked 00:10:39.237 --> 00:10:46.856 questions. We had almost the same amount of conversation we had with almost 200 people or 250 people during 00:10:46.856 --> 00:10:53.870 the live sessions. But we're not sure exactly where we should go with the midweek chat, is that something we 00:10:53.870 --> 00:10:59.238 should do every week or do people maybe want to run their own chats? So we're kind of looking for some ideas 00:10:59.238 --> 00:11:06.571 from the community. And I also wanted to point out, to give a shout out to Drew Harry whose been the person 00:11:06.571 --> 00:11:13.304 behind a lot of the chat improvements and setting up the backchannel chat and whose really got some exciting 00:11:13.304 --> 00:11:17.537 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 00:11:17.537 --> 00:11:23.806 we could say thank you Drew and you should follow him on twitter, he's doing really interesting work in this 00:11:23.806 --> 00:11:34.071 space. And then the final announcement is this week for the first time we're going to do a rebroadcast. So a lot 00:11:34.071 --> 00:11:41.037 of people tune into the live session and then they can chat in the background. And then we thought for people in 00:11:41.037 --> 00:11:45.805 different timezones where this time is difficult we could do a rebroadcast or maybe two rebroadcasts. We're going 00:11:45.805 --> 00:11:54.271 to do one tomorrow, mainly for Europe which will happen at 6pm CET. And then we're hoping to still do one 00:11:54.271 --> 00:12:01.355 for Asia but we're looking for someone to partner with who can definitely be awake at that time because we may 00:12:01.355 --> 00:12:09.805 be sleeping. So without further ado, I'd love to jump into the discussion with Audrey and Mako and first of all 00:12:09.805 --> 00:12:17.471 thank you very much for joining us and bearing with us through some of these technical details and problems we 00:12:17.471 --> 00:12:23.705 had in the beginning and might even still be having. I'm seeing people frantically rearranging laptops around. 00:12:23.705 --> 00:12:34.037 And I thought a good first question would be to ask you how you got interested in open learning and what your 00:12:34.037 --> 00:12:43.538 trajectory is. And as you talk about that maybe also give us some insight on what your definition of open learning 00:12:43.538 --> 00:12:49.805 is because there are lots of different aspects of open or people have lots of different understandings of open and 00:12:49.805 --> 00:12:57.770 of learning. And I thought I could ask you guys to introduce yourselves by talking a little bit about your open learning 00:12:57.770 --> 00:13:06.271 experiences and why don't we start with Audrey. And i know we've had lots of conversations around this stuff and 00:13:06.271 --> 00:13:14.137 around the larger courses that are happening right now. Also theres one conversation about the diminishing value 00:13:14.137 --> 00:13:22.357 of the crafts where people, theres a more standardized way of education and learning that people seem to be expected 00:13:22.357 --> 00:13:32.022 to participate in and I think we were talking about carpentry or something and why isn't that more promoted or 00:13:32.022 --> 00:13:38.404 appreciated pathway? I don't know if thats the direction you want to take, feel free to go in a totally different direction 00:13:38.404 --> 00:13:42.904 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 00:13:42.904 --> 00:13:50.870 open learning. Audrey: So, my name's Audrey, I'm a education technology writer. And I've actually been 00:13:50.870 --> 00:13:59.837 thinking about the way technology impact the way we teach and learn for a very long time. When I was a college student, 00:13:59.837 --> 00:14:09.370 I actually dropped out of college and had a baby very young and ended up going back to school in the '90s under 00:14:09.370 --> 00:14:16.237 what was then called distance education. And always thinking about the ways in which technology was very 00:14:16.237 --> 00:14:26.204 helpful for folks like me who needed to have a different sort of access to learning resources. But it wasn't until I was 00:14:26.204 --> 00:14:33.856 actually in graduate school much later that I started thinking about open learning particularly with the rise of 00:14:33.856 --> 00:14:40.356 blogging and moving a lot of my conversations about not just what happened in the classroom but my own 00:14:40.356 --> 00:14:49.938 explorations and my own place in the academic world, that I started to really think about the sorts of networks 00:14:49.938 --> 00:14:58.038 I was able to develop and the ways in which I was able to practice this, my work, my research in a different setting 00:14:58.038 --> 00:15:08.337 one that was more transparent than academia often allows graduate students to be. And I've been blogging 00:15:08.337 --> 00:15:22.189 actively since around 2004 and for me thats the way in which I practice online. Some of it obviously has to do with 00:15:22.189 --> 00:15:33.238 how I license my work, the way in which I share my work publicly but its also this notion of different sort 00:15:33.238 --> 00:15:40.522 of transparency and a willingness to put ideas out there that might be half baked and engage in building networks 00:15:40.522 --> 00:15:50.637 with people, sharing ideas with people, working around exploring ideas together on the web. So I feel as though 00:15:50.637 --> 00:15:58.270 thats a very different way of thinking about learning than traditional classrooms, sort of higher ed as I was exposed 00:15:58.270 --> 00:16:12.437 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 00:16:12.437 --> 00:16:20.736 much of what I see actually replicates behaviors that are still very traditional in the classroom. Its less about open 00:16:20.736 --> 00:16:31.521 exploration and more about moving that lecture scenario into a web based one. I think theres a lot to be said 00:16:31.521 --> 00:16:42.356 about inquiry driven, self driven, open connections that online learning offers that simply by having open 00:16:42.356 --> 00:16:51.171 enrollment in online courses doesn't necessarily address. Philipp: Yeah and I definitely want to come back to that 00:16:51.171 --> 00:16:59.139 point about whats going on right now. But Mako, over to you. So you have a wealth of things you could refer 00:16:59.139 --> 00:17:05.205 back to but you shared a very interesting, very personal essay with me just a couple of days ago which I hadn't 00:17:05.205 --> 00:17:13.703 read. I don't know if you want to reflect a little bit on that, kind of what you describe as unlearning and joining 00:17:13.703 --> 00:17:21.703 this geek culture and relating it back to whats happening in learning and education today. Mako: Can you 00:17:21.703 --> 00:17:36.337 hear me now? Is the mic working? So the essay that I shared is called The Geek Show Inherits the Earth or 00:17:36.337 --> 00:17:45.870 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 00:17:45.870 --> 00:17:54.404 of ways not a huge fan of formal schooling as it was applied to me in particular. At the same time that I was 00:17:54.404 --> 00:18:05.856 struggling in school in a lot of ways, I was really thriving in a set of communities around technology communities, 00:18:05.856 --> 00:18:14.972 technology development communities. I initially when I was twelve years old started contributing to a bunch of free 00:18:14.972 --> 00:18:24.305 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 00:18:24.305 --> 00:18:37.539 which is a pretty widely used operating system in the flavor of Linux. I was part of the founding team for 00:18:37.539 --> 00:18:46.638 for the Ubuntu Project which is probably the most widely used Linux distribution. 00:18:46.638 --> 00:18:50.356 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 00:18:50.356 --> 00:18:57.236 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 00:18:57.236 --> 00:19:04.805 learning an enormous amount of stuff producing software that by the time I ended up in college was used by 00:19:04.805 --> 00:19:11.204 many millions of people. I finished high school early and moved to Ethiopia because my parents thought that 00:19:11.204 --> 00:19:20.036 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 00:19:20.036 --> 00:19:25.871 liberal arts school called Hampshire College which attempts to build an alternative approach to education and 00:19:25.871 --> 00:19:34.804 to learning into the curriculum. No grades or tests that sort of thing. And I spent a lot of time at Hampshire and 00:19:34.804 --> 00:19:44.189 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 00:19:44.189 --> 00:19:55.837 of time trying to reconcile both my sort of position in very traditional academic environments and a lot of my work in 00:19:55.837 --> 00:20:02.971 in these free and open software communities where really many of my friends are and where a lot of types of things 00:20:02.971 --> 00:20:10.270 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 00:20:10.270 --> 00:20:19.438 I would consider open learning projects. I worked a bit with the One Laptop Per Child project. I really came to MIT 00:20:19.438 --> 00:20:26.139 originally because the project was starting up and I wanted to get involved in some of the discussion about the software there. Although 00:20:26.139 --> 00:20:37.370 a lot of communities that I work in are projects that aren't explicitly designed as learning projects, projects like Wikipedia, 00:20:37.370 --> 00:20:44.070 Debian or a bunch of these free open software projects but I think enormous amount of learning takes place 00:20:44.070 --> 00:20:49.189 in what I think are these wonderful environments where people can join and begin to participate and ramp up 00:20:49.189 --> 00:20:54.937 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 00:20:54.937 --> 00:21:03.037 tried to bring these two worlds that I operate in, together. My research is about free and open source software communities 00:21:03.037 --> 00:21:11.870 and involves work in a lot of these communities as well. Philipp: Yeah actually could you maybe give a short summary 00:21:11.870 --> 00:21:17.536 of how these communities work, because not everyone may be as familiar, so without going into all the details? 00:21:17.536 --> 00:21:22.538 But if you could do a quick summary of how does an open community like an open source software community 00:21:22.538 --> 00:21:29.770 work, whats special about it? Mako: Theres lots of people who write pieces of software, we'll take an example 00:21:29.770 --> 00:21:37.804 of pieces of software although people also create, try to apply similiar sorts of ideas to the other types of 00:21:37.804 --> 00:21:48.003 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 00:21:48.003 --> 00:21:57.071 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 00:21:57.071 --> 00:22:06.037 website or on another hosting website like Github, one many people would use and then I'll invite other people 00:22:06.037 --> 00:22:11.021 to come work with me on it. What happens the vast majority of time, no one really shows up. But sometimes 00:22:11.021 --> 00:22:23.022 in a number of these projects are large communities people who are working together and collaborating on mailing lists and chat 00:22:23.022 --> 00:22:32.304 channels. There are large numbers of people, the majority of whom are making smaller fixes like hey there 00:22:32.304 --> 00:22:36.005 was a bug in this I wanted this to work in a different way, they can download the software, they can make a 00:22:36.005 --> 00:22:41.305 change, they can share it back with the community. But sometimes people become much more involved, you end 00:22:41.305 --> 00:22:47.604 up even with sometimes pretty complicated organizations. So the Debian project which is what I really 00:22:47.604 --> 00:22:55.971 got involved in is the product of, now includes more than 30,000 distinct pieces of software, all sort of integrated 00:22:55.971 --> 00:23:03.606 together. It involves somewhere around 5000 people who have explicit membership in the project, theres a 00:23:03.606 --> 00:23:09.704 membership process, its a real community. I've travelled around the world, almost every city I go to I just look 00:23:09.704 --> 00:23:17.271 up the list of local Debian developers. I'm going to be meeting up with some people, I'm here in Mainz in 00:23:17.271 --> 00:23:22.291 Germany and meeting up with some Debian people while I'm here. Because theres a community of people who've 00:23:22.291 --> 00:23:28.037 been working together, seen eachothers bugs, fixed eachothers bugs and through that process, we've developed 00:23:28.037 --> 00:23:35.670 together an operating system which I'm running on my computer right now using it to talk to you and which 00:23:35.670 --> 00:23:46.504 millions of other people are as well. So its a pretty cool process and community. Philipp: Well the process you've 00:23:46.504 --> 00:23:54.570 just described as kind of putting things out that you've worked on and letting other people contribute or give you 00:23:54.570 --> 00:24:01.705 critique actually sounds very similiar to what Audrey was talking about when she spoke about her blogging practice. 00:24:01.705 --> 00:24:08.472 So I think theres an interesting question about how generalizable are these practices from open source 00:24:08.472 --> 00:24:16.904 software communities to other areas of learning or other communities. I was wondering if actually there are 00:24:16.904 --> 00:24:23.356 two directions we could take with this. One is, one thing thats special about open source software is that 00:24:23.356 --> 00:24:29.437 everyone who participates in that community to some degree works on the same thing, theres one thing that 00:24:29.437 --> 00:24:36.370 people are producing together and theres lots of little pieces that you can tackle there to work on this one thing. 00:24:36.370 --> 00:24:44.704 Maybe in learning other things we don't have that one or maybe we do. And thats one question there, how 00:24:44.704 --> 00:24:51.770 generalizable is that idea. The other one, the question that always comes up as well, this is for software people, 00:24:51.770 --> 00:24:58.404 this is for technology people but is this going to work the same process for other areas of learning maybe the 00:24:58.404 --> 00:25:05.404 humanities? And so maybe over to Audrey to just kind of riffing on this idea of how generalizable are these open 00:25:05.404 --> 00:25:14.371 source software lessons to other areas? Audrey: I do think that some of this, I think as we take what we can from 00:25:14.371 --> 00:25:23.038 open source communities, from software communities, some of this we have to think of in terms of metaphor. So 00:25:23.038 --> 00:25:31.937 when I write something and if I were to post it and share it on Github theres sort of a different expectation about 00:25:31.937 --> 00:25:38.521 what an essay does than what a piece of software does. An essay does not have to be executable in the same way 00:25:38.521 --> 00:25:45.305 that a piece of software does. When we think about debugging an essay its a very different process, I would 00:25:45.305 --> 00:25:54.070 think practically than debugging a software. You could say in some ways its the same way, do you have the semicolon 00:25:54.070 --> 00:26:01.439 in the right place? But I think that when we're thinking about some of these things its actually about debugging 00:26:01.439 --> 00:26:13.906 outside of software is interrogating, interrogating more than just does the code run and can we improve the code? 00:26:13.906 --> 00:26:25.470 But I do think there are some really important and really valuable things that other fields can learn from open source 00:26:25.470 --> 00:26:33.337 communities and part of it has to do with this notion of debugging and thinking about looking at things closely. 00:26:33.337 --> 00:26:43.004 Thinking about how can we fork ideas and always give credit back to build better ways of giving credit back to 00:26:43.004 --> 00:26:53.938 where ideas came from. And also sort of this notion of remembering to license things openly. I've been 00:26:53.938 --> 00:27:00.505 experimenting with putting some of my work up on Github as well and I think there are a lot of interesting 00:27:00.505 --> 00:27:07.070 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 00:27:07.070 --> 00:27:14.504 better use of some of the tools that have been built around something like Github, to be able to track changes, 00:27:14.504 --> 00:27:25.270 to have a more transparent way of filing and managing issues around our learning and not just around our code. Philipp: Yes 00:27:25.270 --> 00:27:32.241 maybe just a quick note for those who may not be aware of what Github is. Its a source code repository where you if 00:27:32.241 --> 00:27:39.805 you're writing software could store your source code and then it was very easy for other people to make a copy 00:27:39.805 --> 00:27:48.204 of that source code to work on it for yourself and send back requests for improvements. So people would fork 00:27:48.204 --> 00:27:56.138 software projects. Maybe one of the more interesting things about it, is that it then spawned this huge community 00:27:56.138 --> 00:28:04.410 of collaboration where people would be working on eachothers software projects, change requests and it 00:28:04.410 --> 00:28:11.871 has grown to, if you were a software developer today, you'd kind of have to be on Github almost to be active 00:28:11.871 --> 00:28:23.438 in the community. So Mako, kind of continuing with how generalizable are these lessons for non-software 00:28:23.438 --> 00:28:33.204 learning communities. I know that you've worked on kind of governance/community practices and guidelines 00:28:33.204 --> 00:28:41.569 and I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about what you wanted to achieve in the open source community 00:28:41.569 --> 00:28:48.805 and then think about would that be a good model for more non-software learning communities? Mako: I would say 00:28:48.805 --> 00:29:00.538 first that the primary, the reason that I became involved with working in these software communities 00:29:00.538 --> 00:29:08.669 was primarily because there was set of principled statements about why software should be free. And 00:29:08.669 --> 00:29:13.971 the argument basically was two-fold. It said that it was important that software was free so that we could share 00:29:13.971 --> 00:29:19.021 it and that anyone who wanted a piece of software could have it because of course if I write a piece of software 00:29:19.021 --> 00:29:25.971 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 00:29:25.971 --> 00:29:33.904 that sharing is good and that there is to some degree, an ethical imperative to share when we can so we should 00:29:33.904 --> 00:29:42.305 do it. And the second point was that software should be under the control of the users because the software 00:29:42.305 --> 00:29:49.070 that I choose to use mediates my experience of the world, I'm limited in my ability to communicate to you by 00:29:49.070 --> 00:29:56.405 decisions made by the team that wrote the software that I'm using to communicate with you all now, hopefully. 00:29:56.405 --> 00:30:03.569 Mostly successfully. And those people who, the technology designers, the people who are implementing 00:30:03.569 --> 00:30:08.305 the technology have an enormous amount of power over all the people who use the technology. They are 00:30:08.305 --> 00:30:15.471 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 00:30:15.471 --> 00:30:22.270 a statement, I think most importantly about, who should be able to control their experience of the world. 00:30:22.270 --> 00:30:28.670 Because the argument went our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by technology. So I think that 00:30:28.670 --> 00:30:37.356 from the perspective, from this principled level, I think the principles apply very clearly to thinking about learning 00:30:37.356 --> 00:30:45.038 or education because I think to the extent of our experience of the world is mediated by the ways in which 00:30:45.038 --> 00:30:52.688 we learn that the questions about how we learn and when we can learn should be under control of the learners. 00:30:52.688 --> 00:31:01.138 From a principled perspective, I think that things translate very well. The main argument in favor of free software 00:31:01.138 --> 00:31:07.038 , the reason that I decided to work on this stuff and lots of other people did as well, I think this is something that 00:31:07.038 --> 00:31:15.069 applies very well. In terms of the organizational forms or the particular tactics or even the particular tools like Github 00:31:15.069 --> 00:31:23.536 I think theres a sense in which, talking about the degree to which Github applies or doesn't apply, and I think in 00:31:23.536 --> 00:31:32.538 some ways it could work effectively for something and in other ways its less good. I think that terms of what Audrey 00:31:32.538 --> 00:31:41.737 mentioned in terms of questions of bug fixing. I think of work sometimes, I sometimes divide them into works 00:31:41.737 --> 00:31:48.371 that are functional and works that are less functional because its very easy to imagine submitting a bug fix to 00:31:48.371 --> 00:31:56.688 something like an encyclopedia article and in fact people do it all the time because there are things that are sometimes clearly 00:31:56.688 --> 00:32:02.570 wrong, sometimes its a little more difficult to understand what might be right or the most right thing in a 00:32:02.570 --> 00:32:08.022 particular context. But I think that even that conversation is something that happens a lot in the case of software very often. 00:32:08.022 --> 00:32:13.270 I think software is actually the.., as someone whose spent a lot of time writing software, I think the question of 00:32:13.270 --> 00:32:18.870 what is or is not clearly a bug is something people will spend an enormous amount of time talking about. And 00:32:18.870 --> 00:32:30.645 I think thats a useful conversation that teaches people a lot about how we can learn a lot about it. But I think there 00:32:30.645 --> 00:32:37.305 are lots of lessons in terms of the particular tools and terms of the particular processes and forms of organization 00:32:37.305 --> 00:32:43.370 Wikipedia was explicitly inspired by the free software movement, it used licenses and tools which were 00:32:43.370 --> 00:32:50.170 modelled after things which had happened, which had been built and used in software development for a long time. 00:32:50.170 --> 00:32:56.638 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 00:32:56.638 --> 00:33:04.371 I think theres lots to be learned in a bunch of different ways. Audrey: I think that theres something as well about this 00:33:04.371 --> 00:33:13.188 notion of software in particular, proprietary software thats increasingly that you are unable to crack it open and 00:33:13.188 --> 00:33:21.905 look at it and it truly is a black box. For me, thats the opposite of what, thats the absolute antithesis of what we 00:33:21.905 --> 00:33:30.170 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 00:33:30.170 --> 00:33:34.356 we're talking about our own processes or the subjects that we might be learning about. We do want to be able to 00:33:34.356 --> 00:33:44.739 crack it open, study how it works, look at all of the pieces and figure it out at sort of a fundamental level, back 00:33:44.739 --> 00:33:51.904 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 00:33:51.904 --> 00:33:59.936 a different way of us thinking about software that moves away from this black box that you don't want to know 00:33:59.936 --> 00:34:07.070 in that scenario, you don't get to know how it functions, you're just supposed to know that it works. 00:34:07.070 --> 00:34:16.537 And so I think its important in learning that you don't just get this received knowledge that you're supposed to nod 00:34:16.537 --> 00:34:23.370 and say, oh yes this is the way it works, of course it does because it appeared in my text or my professor told 00:34:23.370 --> 00:34:33.606 me that this was the truth. As learners we should be allowed to crack things open and look more deeply. So I think the 00:34:33.606 --> 00:34:41.605 open source model , openly licensed tools, things that let us dive in rather than stand back and consume are 00:34:41.605 --> 00:34:54.521 incredibily important. Mako: I totally agree with that and I think the..., but also become a producer of the stuff. Audrey: 00:34:54.521 --> 00:35:00.470 Yes. Mako: The metaphor that I sometimes use is imagine a world where we taught everyone to read but 00:35:00.470 --> 00:35:10.856 not to write. And thats the world we live in, in regards to lots of different kinds of technology and software where 00:35:10.856 --> 00:35:19.471 people don't have the ability, the can learn but they can't change it. I think thats a , you can imagine what 00:35:19.471 --> 00:35:31.204 the implications to like democracy would be. Its pretty striking. Philipp: Thanks, whats very interesting to me is 00:35:31.204 --> 00:35:40.404 hearing you talk about it. One of the articles we read this week was Illich's Learning Webs chapter from 00:35:40.404 --> 00:35:48.104 Deschooling Society. And a lot of things you just mentioned, you don't want the world to be a black box. You 00:35:48.104 --> 00:35:55.437 want to be able to tinker with it and look under the hood. He wrote about the Web of Things and had this fantastic 00:35:55.437 --> 00:36:01.272 idea where could you go anywhere, any building, any person, look under their hood and say, how does that work? 00:36:01.272 --> 00:36:08.504 I think theres a certain attitude in the open source world where people actually expect the world to work like that. 00:36:08.504 --> 00:36:19.637 And sometimes even when the law or other limitations make that harder, we try to find ways around it. And then also 00:36:19.637 --> 00:36:27.477 I think that theres a very strong notion of agency that I'm hearing in your remarks where its not only that we 00:36:27.477 --> 00:36:34.270 should place limits on who controls access to learning and education but also that the people who are the learners 00:36:34.270 --> 00:36:42.937 should be able to choose how they want to participate, first of all we shouldn't limit who can participate as much as 00:36:42.937 --> 00:36:51.370 possible but then also how they want to participate is a question that we don't ask enough in formal education. So 00:36:51.370 --> 00:37:01.570 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 00:37:01.570 --> 00:37:08.837 often talk about very interesting and compelling ideas for how learning can take place and we find examples for 00:37:08.837 --> 00:37:18.437 it but often, it hasn't really changed the institutions in which most of the learning still happens. Theres often a question 00:37:18.437 --> 00:37:24.304 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 00:37:24.304 --> 00:37:33.022 do this?" And I think we should spend some time talking about this broadly. The question to tie it up would be, 00:37:33.022 --> 00:37:40.805 there is a very strong notion of activism in both of your backgrounds and works and there is certainly this kind of, 00:37:40.805 --> 00:37:49.805 a little bit us vs them feeling and controlling these things on the fringes. I think thats been very useful because 00:37:49.805 --> 00:37:56.305 its given us an identity, it creates a community of people who believe in the same things. But I'm wondering 00:37:56.305 --> 00:38:04.337 whats the next phase in this. Will we have to be the alternative or is there a way to infuse the system with some 00:38:04.337 --> 00:38:20.237 more of this activism? ...... I know I know either of you please. Audrey: I think that we're starting to see some 00:38:20.237 --> 00:38:31.689 pretty interesting things particularly around push back around open access in publications, thats definitely 00:38:31.689 --> 00:38:37.638 something thats connected to institutional power. Your success as a professor sort of deeply intertwined 00:38:37.638 --> 00:38:46.639 professionally with your ability to publish, so how can professors help leverage and change the publishing, the 00:38:46.639 --> 00:38:53.270 academic publishing industry to be more open access. So some of the walls, the barriers to be able to access that 00:38:53.270 --> 00:39:01.471 knowledge come down. I think we're seeing that around the open data movement so that people are showing 00:39:01.471 --> 00:39:10.772 their work and having anyone has the access to the data, the raw data that went into making various tools, or 00:39:10.772 --> 00:39:20.382 making various decisions or doing research. I think the ways in which we're seeing openness permeate 00:39:20.382 --> 00:39:30.470 institutions, government, universities, Science, I do think we're starting to see some movement forward but I'm 00:39:30.470 --> 00:39:37.770 not sure, I do think that even in those cases all of that work feels very much like activism and it does feel like 00:39:37.770 --> 00:39:46.237 you're having to agitate for pretty substantial changes in which these processes and institutions and business 00:39:46.237 --> 00:39:56.270 models have worked up until now. Philipp: Mako maybe just sort of tee off for you, why don't you say a few words 00:39:56.270 --> 00:40:03.205 about where you're headed because I know you're moving into a more formal academic setting and how is 00:40:03.205 --> 00:40:14.137 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 00:40:14.137 --> 00:40:26.771 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 00:40:26.771 --> 00:40:35.604 working in this space for now 28 years in free software and we've made so much progress. When I was a kid starting 00:40:35.604 --> 00:40:43.378 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 00:40:43.378 --> 00:40:48.605 super buggy, it had no feature. I'm running an operating system which is almost entirely free software, my phone 00:40:48.605 --> 00:40:59.271 runs free software, your phone probably runs free software unless you have an iphone. And yes is it the world that 00:40:59.271 --> 00:41:06.569 I had envisioned in every detail, no of course not. There are lots of ways in which lots of things have taken turns 00:41:06.569 --> 00:41:13.189 for what I think the worst but I think we've made important progress. The second point is that I want to continue 00:41:13.189 --> 00:41:19.604 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 00:41:19.604 --> 00:41:25.605 to stake out that ground. Other people will make the compromises necessary to put the stuff on my 00:41:25.605 --> 00:41:39.638 phone, maybe my constitution is the activist constitution and thats something which I want my world to be the crazy 00:41:39.638 --> 00:41:48.204 not just saying that things are not good enough, but showing or trying to build examples of how it can be 00:41:48.204 --> 00:41:56.522 better. And I hope that I never live to feel that things couldn't be better because they just worked out already. 00:41:56.522 --> 00:42:08.871 I think that means that I've lost my imagination or something. I think that that said theres all kinds of 00:42:08.871 --> 00:42:22.370 structural limitations that cause one to even in my own work not be able to live up to my own expectations. I can't 00:42:22.370 --> 00:42:31.271 as I teach, you know I'm going to be at the University of Washington teaching, starting next year and I'll be teaching 00:42:31.271 --> 00:42:40.037 classes at a state university and theres all kinds of ways of running classes. I want to say everyone gets an A in the 00:42:40.037 --> 00:42:47.238 class today, if you never want to come back again, great, if you do maybe we could teach eachother something. 00:42:47.238 --> 00:42:53.439 I haven't talked about it to the head of the department yet but I guess there will have to be some compromise 00:42:53.439 --> 00:42:59.972 between that position and whatever else I'm going to work out. But I think that the fact that we have to 00:42:59.972 --> 00:43:04.937 compromise or settle does not mean that we can't move the needle. And I hope to be pushing hard on that 00:43:04.937 --> 00:43:11.237 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 00:43:11.237 --> 00:43:19.536 enough success in projects that I've seen in areas that I've worked on in relation to software, in relation, for example 00:43:19.536 --> 00:43:28.904 encyclopedias which are now freely available. Theres so much great free and open stuff now that didn't exist 20 years 00:43:28.904 --> 00:43:41.188 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 00:43:41.188 --> 00:43:53.523 support the first derivative as well that would be even better. I don't know, I'm optimistic and I try to compromise 00:43:53.523 --> 00:44:04.705 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 00:44:04.705 --> 00:44:12.105 and more institutions are at least talking about experimenting with open learning and open education. 00:44:12.105 --> 00:44:22.670 The example are these MOOCs which is an acronym that stands for Massive Open Online Courses, its even got 00:44:22.670 --> 00:44:33.304 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 00:44:33.304 --> 00:44:40.171 experiment, this is a way of opening up access to the institution. I know Audrey has been writing and thinking 00:44:40.171 --> 00:44:49.037 about this quite a bit and I wanted to together reflect a little on are these open courses examples for the kind of open 00:44:49.037 --> 00:44:56.937 learning that we have in mind, or that you have been thinking about? Or where do they fall short and what are 00:44:56.937 --> 00:45:01.437 some of the things you find interesting about them? What are some of the things you'd like to see them do 00:45:01.437 --> 00:45:10.705 differently? Audrey: I think its really interesting to me particularly as Mako was saying we are living in a 00:45:10.705 --> 00:45:19.071 world now where there are so many interesting and powerful open projects that I'm seeing many, I'm seeing open become a 00:45:19.071 --> 00:45:27.570 word that is a bit like green washing, that as long as you slap natural on the label of your food, of course its 00:45:27.570 --> 00:45:36.022 healthy and good for you. So I do think we still need to interrogate what we mean by open and I think that its 00:45:36.022 --> 00:45:45.171 incredibly important that these classes are open enrollment. I think that letting anyone who wants to participate 00:45:45.171 --> 00:45:57.670 in an online class, sign up, check it out for free is huge particularly in light of the high cost of college tuition. I 00:45:57.670 --> 00:46:06.355 think this is incredibly significant and I don't want to diminish that at all. I think that those of us that are trying 00:46:06.355 --> 00:46:17.037 to push these conversations forward, I think that we do need to ask other questions like is this sufficient, is open 00:46:17.037 --> 00:46:25.971 enrollment sufficiently open, are these classes using openly licensed work? Do these classes live on the open web? 00:46:25.971 --> 00:46:39.523 Are people in these classes able to form their own learning communities? And to use a technical term, to fork 00:46:39.523 --> 00:46:47.771 the ideas that are happening in the lecture and then run down and build their own, go down their own learning 00:46:47.771 --> 00:46:56.804 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 00:46:56.804 --> 00:47:07.404 an online version of the massive lecture hall in which the professor is still the person who has, purportedly, who has 00:47:07.404 --> 00:47:12.106 all the knowledge and is there to fill the student's brains with what they need to know in order to pass the 00:47:12.106 --> 00:47:22.905 multiple choice tests every 15 minutes. I think we need to push the boundaries still for MOOCs, I think they're great 00:47:22.905 --> 00:47:33.805 first step in terms of access. But I'm not sure that thats my vision of what open learning looks like. Philipp: Mako 00:47:33.805 --> 00:47:38.738 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 00:47:38.738 --> 00:47:47.004 that for me the most transformative learning experiences have been the ones outside the context of courses. 00:47:47.004 --> 00:47:54.439 I've had some great transformative courses but I think that, I've never taken a programming course, yes thats true 00:47:54.439 --> 00:48:01.470 I've worked in operating system projects for a long time, I've learned in communities where I wanted to do things 00:48:01.470 --> 00:48:07.971 and had to, I looked in books, I looked at some type of course or teaching materials but mostly I learned from 00:48:07.971 --> 00:48:18.356 working with people, being exposed to code written by people that were better than I was, for example. I sort of 00:48:18.356 --> 00:48:24.105 half took one, I was one of those people who was curious, so I signed up for one and then dropped out half way 00:48:24.105 --> 00:48:33.522 in the middle, I guess like many people. I thought it was interesting and exciting. I totally agree with Audrey, this 00:48:33.522 --> 00:48:42.537 idea of theres a lot of important questions, that a lot of people at the moment are struggling with and I think even 00:48:42.537 --> 00:48:50.437 fighting over what open enough is or what it means. I think thats a great opportunity for all of us who have 00:48:50.437 --> 00:48:58.638 strong feelings about this to come in and help answer that. To think hard about what we think open enough is and sort 00:48:58.638 --> 00:49:06.670 of draw a line in the sand. Philipp: I think we have a question from the back channel or from the room. 00:49:06.670 --> 00:49:16.170 Mitch: One question in the back channel is around the idea of debugging, Susan VG started the conversation 00:49:16.170 --> 00:49:22.237 in the back channel when Mako was talking about debugging software. Then a discussion about debugging 00:49:22.237 --> 00:49:29.038 ideas and how can we draw that idea of debugging to all sorts of different things in open learning. Not just 00:49:29.038 --> 00:49:32.338 thinking debugging the thing, but debugging our own thinking, so maybe they could reflect somewhat on b 00:49:32.338 --> 00:49:40.637 broader ways of thinking about debugging and open learning? Audrey: I think debugging is a very important 00:49:40.637 --> 00:49:48.704 thing in terms of our own learning and in terms of sharing our ideas with others. Its not necessarily a way in 00:49:48.704 --> 00:49:57.855 which we often frame problem solving but I think it is a very interesting way to do so. Its something that as a writer, 00:49:57.855 --> 00:50:02.470 someone who spends a lot of time writing, i taught writing for a number of ways as well. Thinking about the way 00:50:02.470 --> 00:50:09.204 in which the logic for example of an argument works is something that you can think about in terms of debugging 00:50:09.204 --> 00:50:22.205 because of the logical steps of an argument do require certain perhaps not the same level of ability to run a 00:50:22.205 --> 00:50:29.856 program would but theres still has to be some process by which part A connects to part B and that leads you to part 00:50:29.856 --> 00:50:40.004 C. So I think debugging is a really useful concept and its useful for I think students for their own processes as 00:50:40.004 --> 00:50:53.870 well. Define when they stumble, define places where the idea just doesn't execute correctly or efficiently. Mako: 00:50:53.870 --> 00:51:00.570 Yeah, I agree. Debugging is one of these metaphors that is something that I use like in reference to not software 00:51:00.570 --> 00:51:08.669 all the time. Its one little piece of that software developer me that has come in and thought about other 00:51:08.669 --> 00:51:18.037 places as well. I think its more about the process, the idea of ok lets think about after this step whats the state 00:51:18.037 --> 00:51:28.471 as a way of breaking down certain types of problems in the way of undressing. I think its really useful. Theres a 00:51:28.471 --> 00:51:34.249 bunch of interesting things, thinking about patterns, I'm doing the same kind of thing here and here and here 00:51:34.249 --> 00:51:40.637 maybe I could think about whats the sort of abstract thing being used here? Also a lot of interesting tools. I also 00:51:40.637 --> 00:51:52.104 think its limiting that there are lots of, not everything can be easily expressed as a bug, a lot of things are just 00:51:52.104 --> 00:52:03.189 sort of nested or a matter of taste or fuzzier, they're less clearly wrong and so less clearly thought about in terms 00:52:03.189 --> 00:52:08.705 of bugs or debugging. But I do think its a very useful process. I also like the idea, this is something that 00:52:08.705 --> 00:52:20.205 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 00:52:20.205 --> 00:52:29.370 things don't work, identify issues or bugs and then sort of address them. Philipp: Yes, we have another...just one 00:52:29.370 --> 00:52:35.856 quick comment as you were talking about it, you reminded me of in formal education, you learn something, 00:52:35.856 --> 00:52:41.905 you write a test at the end, you get the results, you move on, theres no time for debugging. And debugging 00:52:41.905 --> 00:52:49.305 is considered something you wouldn't do in education. Either you've learned it or you haven't and the reality is you 00:52:49.305 --> 00:52:56.688 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. 00:52:56.688 --> 00:53:05.004 And often things go wrong but its often the best way to learn, to push yourself to the point where maybe things 00:53:05.004 --> 00:53:10.522 will break and then debug them with the other people and I think its a skill that we are still learning because 00:53:10.522 --> 00:53:19.037 when you're about to start the broadcast and the audio isn't working it freaks you out, its nervewrecking but in a way 00:53:19.037 --> 00:53:27.303 its more exciting to learn that way than to sit in a room with no audience and play around with the software. But anyway 00:53:27.303 --> 00:53:35.905 theres another question here from the online community. Ricarose: So this question is from TL2 and they're 00:53:35.905 --> 00:53:41.403 asking if the panelists have any advice for a classroom teacher, how they can advance open learning in these 00:53:41.403 --> 00:53:55.315 settings? Audrey: With classroom teachers with students, I think that part of it has to be moving towards a more 00:53:55.315 --> 00:54:05.039 collaborative environment. I think theres something about traditional schooling in which we're taught as though the teacher 00:54:05.039 --> 00:54:11.938 the textbook and although we're sitting in a classroom full of other learners, its somehow our learning is our own and 00:54:11.938 --> 00:54:21.436 happens in isolation. I think that learning to work together, learning to debug and trouble shoot, solve problems 00:54:21.436 --> 00:54:31.538 together, to me is the first step in openness, to be able to lay out your thinking in front of others and bounce ideas 00:54:31.538 --> 00:54:42.471 off of one another. I think moving away from this isolated, individual, being forced to learn alone, is really the 00:54:42.471 --> 00:54:49.205 first step towards openness. Knowing that we always learn together, we always learn socially, we work 00:54:49.205 --> 00:54:55.737 collaboratively, as humans we should help make 00:54:55.737 --> 00:55:11.437 learning look more like that rather than expect students to stumble through things in isolation. Mako: I would totally 00:55:11.437 --> 00:55:23.371 echo that. So one thing that I found very effective, is doing my work in these, not just outside the individual but 00:55:23.371 --> 00:55:32.770 within a group but out in the internet in these public spaces, it depends a little bit on the classroom but its often 00:55:32.770 --> 00:55:39.272 very possible to encourage the students not just to document for themselves or for the classroom but to do 00:55:39.272 --> 00:55:47.106 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 00:55:47.106 --> 00:55:53.537 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 00:55:53.537 --> 00:56:00.004 the Scratch online community, if you're writing software to upload it into Github or something else. In some cases 00:56:00.004 --> 00:56:04.371 people are going to come back, they're going to work on it, they're going to make comments and that sort of 00:56:04.371 --> 00:56:14.371 engagement out in the world can lead to both the creation of these communities but also a kind of, I think when 00:56:14.371 --> 00:56:19.904 people know their stuff is going to be public, they often treat it differently then they would otherwise in ways that 00:56:19.904 --> 00:56:27.905 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 00:56:27.905 --> 00:56:34.169 can think about applying in classrooms right now which lots of classrooms are already doing in various ways. 00:56:34.169 --> 00:56:40.838 In terms of these existing communities, encouraging people to get involved and put their stuff out there and try to 00:56:40.838 --> 00:56:51.371 contribute to something that is not just directly useful to a lot of people but directly useful to, really useful to the 00:56:51.371 --> 00:56:56.537 learning process itself. Audrey: I think that ties back to something you were saying earlier as well that we want to 00:56:56.537 --> 00:57:03.074 really help students become not just the consumers of knowledge but also producers and creators of knowledge 00:57:03.074 --> 00:57:13.470 themselves. So when you help students contribute to learning communities, contribute online, they recognize 00:57:13.470 --> 00:57:18.871 that they have a stake in the creation and construction of knowledge that they really aren't 00:57:18.871 --> 00:57:28.438 just these receptacles to have their brains filled up with other peoples stuff. I think that thats incredibly powerful that we want 00:57:28.438 --> 00:57:38.638 people to feel that they can build and make not just consume things. Mako: And I think that so much energy 00:57:38.638 --> 00:57:50.637 and effort goes into producing assignments which are then read by the teacher, just sort of put to the side. And 00:57:50.637 --> 00:57:57.138 people learn in the process so that can be useful. But I think that in so many of these examples, there are people 00:57:57.138 --> 00:58:05.356 who would love to really have problems that they want solved. Wikipedia, the vast majority of content in 00:58:05.356 --> 00:58:15.237 Wikipedia doesn't exist in any language other than English. People would love a poor translation even done by 00:58:15.237 --> 00:58:19.937 someone who was learning and they might be able to fix it up and if you stay involved you could learn in that 00:58:19.937 --> 00:58:28.771 process, is just one example. Philipp: Do you want to skip that? We're running a little bit.. Mitch: There's a few more 00:58:28.771 --> 00:58:34.175 questions but maybe we can ask Mako and Audrey to answer them online, we'll post them online and try 00:58:34.175 --> 00:58:39.308 to get them engaged in the discussion in the Google + community. Philipp: That would be great and we're happy to 00:58:39.308 --> 00:58:45.371 point you to the right places and maybe summarize them. That would actually be a perfect example also for the open 00:58:45.371 --> 00:58:54.960 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 00:58:54.960 --> 00:59:01.338 bit about logistics. And that is, people, a lot of the responses that I often hear when we talk about these open 00:59:01.338 --> 00:59:10.604 learning ideas is well this works for some people and that group is sometimes even described as an elite. Its not 00:59:10.604 --> 00:59:18.356 the old elite who went to all the right schools necessarily but it is, both of you have very compelling personal stories 00:59:18.356 --> 00:59:25.770 and you've been very resourceful and you've had strong interests and you've followed your passions. So I think 00:59:25.770 --> 00:59:33.270 some people may feel, how can I apply those practices to my own life? And I think it would be great if maybe you 00:59:33.270 --> 00:59:43.106 could say a few sentences about, is this a new elite or is this something fairly easy to pick up by anyone? And kind 00:59:43.106 --> 00:59:53.438 of apply to their own situations? This is the part where I'm looking for an inspiring closing remarks. Audrey: I think 00:59:53.438 --> 01:00:10.371 that they don't work for everyone. I think if we can be make learning be passion based, if it can be inquiry based 01:00:10.371 --> 01:00:18.871 if we can encourage curiosity we might not have students solving a whole new legion of math worksheets 01:00:18.871 --> 01:00:29.204 but maybe we'd have them work on some pretty cool, things that really authentically drive their own learning forward. 01:00:29.204 --> 01:00:39.471 I do think optimizing for passion, optimizing for curiosity are the whim here. And I think, I recognize there 01:00:39.471 --> 01:00:49.570 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 01:00:49.570 --> 01:00:56.937 particularly for young learners and going with that is an incredibly empowering first start and its something that 01:00:56.937 --> 01:01:09.106 schooling tends not to do. Mako: And I think that not everyone is going to become a Debian developer, not 01:01:09.106 --> 01:01:16.038 everyone is going to work on the kinds of projects that I've worked on and I think thats great. Because theres a world 01:01:16.038 --> 01:01:21.737 of other stuff which is not being done at all and is really important. Theres a bunch of really great projects 01:01:21.737 --> 01:01:30.470 going around to seniors and helping provide a little bit of information to them on how they can contribute to 01:01:30.470 --> 01:01:38.106 Wikipedia for example so that they can document their own experiences in their lives in their towns and villages and 01:01:38.106 --> 01:01:45.070 spaces. Its been enormously useful to them and transformative to them that they are able to do this. And its 01:01:45.070 --> 01:01:53.806 really great for the rest of the world that gets access to all this really great information. There are huge, I think that 01:01:53.806 --> 01:02:11.237 whats necessary is more just, everyone has skills and interests which other people want enormously at any 01:02:11.237 --> 01:02:18.770 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 01:02:18.770 --> 01:02:24.537 them, who've been building tools to support this kind of work have historically focused on the kinds of things that 01:02:24.537 --> 01:02:29.137 are useful to them. So as a software developer I spent a lot of time writing tools that are often useful for other software 01:02:29.137 --> 01:02:41.169 developers. And I think that if we spent 10% as much time building tools for great documentation of, or collaboration 01:02:41.169 --> 01:02:47.437 around articles of fashion or clothing, we would have so much more work in that space. Thats just an example 01:02:47.437 --> 01:02:52.439 of something that I think has been relatively underserved in these communities as compared to software. But I 01:02:52.439 --> 01:02:59.689 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 01:02:59.689 --> 01:03:10.205 broader and only going to get bigger and no one has any excuse anymore. Philipp: Thank you both for participating 01:03:10.205 --> 01:03:17.737 and tuning in from, actually Makos in Berlin, Audrey is in California, we're all over the world here, and sharing 01:03:17.737 --> 01:03:26.003 your stories and your thoughts on this. There are a couple of more slides about next week. I'm going to hand over 01:03:26.003 --> 01:03:41.306 to Mitch or Ricarose. I've also got the remix slide so maybe, do you want to? Ricarose: So next week we'll have 01:03:41.306 --> 01:03:51.570 the theme will be Social Creativity and we'll have Gerard Fischer and Andres Monroy Hernandez with us. 01:03:51.570 --> 01:03:58.522 For the activity next week, we're going to do another activity with Scratch, we're going to do a remixing 01:03:58.522 --> 01:04:07.022 activity. As you can see there is a project page in Scratch website, scratch.mit.edu and we'll ask you to explore 01:04:07.022 --> 01:04:15.004 some of their projects there and find a project that you think is interesting and you can download it and look at the 01:04:15.004 --> 01:04:22.837 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 01:04:22.837 --> 01:04:31.137 in the project notes share what you changed and also remember to give credit. Is there anything else? Philipp: No 01:04:31.157 --> 01:04:36.121 thats it so thanks for participating, thanks to you guys again, thanks to the online community and for those who 01:04:36.121 --> 01:04:40.121 who are, for whom this time didn't work maybe we'll see you tomorrow for the rebroadcast of the session.