this is a response posted to “The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform” by Aaron Bady in The New Inquiry, May 15.

“MOOC” means Massive Open Online Course, as in the courses now being offered by Udacity, Coursera, and EdX in partnership with universities.

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You have good observations and critique, and there’s certainly room for suspicion around MOOCs, but I think this article succumbs to a somewhat paranoiac cultural-studies frame.

Yes, there’s hype around MOOCs, people championing them for some questionable reasons, and incomplete referencing of the history of online pedagogy. But there are also real issues and opportunities driving the phenomenon, not merely deluded or cynical hype, and you tend to caricature MOOCs as rather more fixed and well-defined than I believe them to be.

In your presentation, the current mainstream system of in-classroom teaching is self-evidently the “real” and better educational experience, and MOOCs are an unproven threat.

I’d say that the current system has pervasive problems of cost, access, equality, and outcomes, and we’re in a moment of new possibilities opening up to address some of those problems: not only the MOOC form, but more flexible accreditation, perhaps not controlled by the incumbent higher-ed sector; new learning approaches and technologies.

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(followup to my last post: “Escaping from freedom: the problem of designing for user agency“).

Twitter is generally presented as a “stream” media model — you dip in and see some sampling of messages from accounts you follow. However, what if you wanted to use it more deliberately, e.g. scanning and analyzing all messages, analyzing the volume and quality of each of your follows’ output, or reading tweets sorted or filtered any way you wanted? What if you want the wide radar and engagement, but more control over the noise?

I believe that technically this *is* possible: and it would be an extremely useful way to combine Twitter’s strengths with the type of user control associated with more “expert” tools like Google Reader, Feedly, or SocialBro. Existing 3rd-party Twitter clients such as TweetDeck had some of these aspects, but they are more or less being shut down by Twitter or no longer in development.

However, we need to keep building our own tools, or as McLuhan said, they will build us. Today an increasing need is for tools/practices to manage our attention and information, or as Howard Rheingold’s aptly put it, “intelligence dashboards, news radars, and information filters.”

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The Guardian had an excellent story recently, “Conscious computing: how to take control of your life online” by Oliver Burkeman. It focuses on movements, tools, and practices that seek to counteract the deliberately distracting tendency of most current Internet media and services.

The problem is aptly described by Nir Eyal, a Silicon Valley internet entrepreneur who cites the “behavior design” models of Stanford psychologist BJ Fogg as inspiration:

Let’s admit it, we in the consumer web industry are in the manipulation business. We build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people “users” and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly addicted.

Eyal advocates a version of this approach for product development, which he calls the “Hooked” method, which is also the title of his forthcoming book.

I think of this situation as part of a more general pattern: the perennial tension in the information environment between user agency and producer agency. User agency is when the user has control over the environment/media: for example, time- and device-shifting of content, peer-to-peer media, blogging, open-source tools, remix culture, net neutrality, and general-purpose computing devices. Producer agency, on the other hand, is exemplified by broadcasting, bundling of information goods (e.g. cable TV), click-wrap licensing, DRM, etc.

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The journal PLOS Biology published a paper ”An Introduction to Social Media for Scientists” by Holly M. Bik and Miriam C. Goldstein, on April 23. It has quickly become one of their most popular papers, with almost 25,000 views just over a week later.

In my comment submitted on the paper, which is copied in full below, I suggest this guide is oriented to the practices of current “early adopters” of these media, whereas we might anticipate that an increasing majority of future adopters:

1. will be more casual / lower-engagement,
2. may be intermediaries serving scientists, e.g. publishers, rather than scientists engaging directly; and
3. may tend to engage social media networks via activities/signals embedded in their own tools, e.g. journal platforms, rather than on the social media networks directly.

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Nature magazine published a special issue “The future of publishing: a new page“ 27 March 2013. The next day, Cameron Neylon published a Comment, “Let’s get this straight: Open-access terminology needs to be employed accurately“), in Times Higher Education.

This is a “storify” or gathering of an extended conversation on Twitter, referencing the issue and article above, between me and a number of leading advocates of and commentators on  Open Access publishing:

• John Wilbanks, Open Access advocate formerly at the Science Commons project of Creative Commons, now at Sage Bionetworks. Based in Washington, D.C.
• Jason Hoyt: co-founder, Mendeley, currently co-founder at PeerJ, London.
• Matthew Cockerill – Co-founder, BioMed Central, now at Springer BioMed Central, London.
• David Mainwaring – Commissioning Editor, SAGE Publications, London. (specialty in International Relations).
• Martin Paul Eve – lecturer, University of Lincoln; co-founder, Open Library of Humanities.
• Cameron Neylon – Advocacy Director for PLOS (Public Library of Science). Based in Bath, UK.
• Jan Velterop – founding director of BioMed Central, BOAI (Budapest) signatory, CEO Academic Concept Knowledge Limited (AQnowledge).
• Peter Murray-Rust – Professor of Chemistry, Cambridge.

I. Conversation archive
II.  Afterword:  proposing “Collaborative Advocacy”
III. Followup conversation (added 31 Mar)

 

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I commented on the article “Open access for the people” by Stephen Curry in The Guardian, March 20, 2012.

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thanks, excellent article. I agree that intelligibility & translation for many audiences might usefully be considered part of “open access” in a broad sense. Personally, I’m especially interested in ways to do this through social media, possibly supported by algorithmic, crowdsourced, or peersourced summaries & extractions.

I’d like though to suggest a slightly broader context to the basic premise:

“Open access publishing is making the research literature freely available to the public….the primary function of the research literature is to facilitate and formalise the exchange of information between experts in a particular field.”

I’d suggest this notion of “research” is perhaps an unduly particular notion of scholarship, associated with contemporary science. In that context, yes, publication may be indeed primarily directed at the small group of people who may be able/interested to specifically reproduce, build on, or evaluate the research result.

On the other hand, as you note, publication spreads research across boundaries. Scientific journals have always been in part about sharing results to a broader field — from their origin in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665, to the most prestigious journals today such as Nature, Science, and Cell. In many fields now, exchange with experts in your particular field may be more likely occurring through more informal mechanisms than journals, such as preprint or data repositories, blogs, or mailing lists; and formal publication mainly a public, archival record.

Instead of “research” I think in some ways “scholarship” may be a more historically accurate and inclusive term, especially from the standpoint of non-scientific fields. In the words of the foundational Budapest Open Access Initiative declaration of 2002,

“The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment.”

This “literature” is not limited to science, or to journal/article content, and might well include “public scholarship” of various forms for various publics. Many social scientists and humanities scholars may and arguably should see broad publics as the audiences for their work, and there are not necessarily any insurmountable barriers of vocabulary or method or context required for broad audiences to engage with the work, unlike with most research science.

In my opinion, the use of the term “research” across all disciplines suggests a certain hegemony of scientific peer-review literature as the model and ideal of scholarship, one which posits specialists rather than publics as the audience. I believe fields outside of natural science, particularly, should question this model, and look to reclaim their rich history of — and greater potential for — broad public engagement.

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Tim McCormick
Co-founder, Open Library of Humanities
@tmccormick / http://tjm.org / Palo Alto, CA, USA