Photo by jeanbaptisteparis

On a humid evening in August, a tray of hors d’oeuvres passes through the lobby and patio adorning Edmonton’s Latitude 53 art gallery. Every Thursday through the summer, this rooftop on 106 Street comes alive with Edmonton’s working socialites. There’s music, booze and – sometimes – a bit of sunshine.

“It’s growing in popularity and in strength every year,” says Latitude’s Jenna Frost. This year’s Rooftop Patio Series was exceptionally popular, surpassing the expectations and projected goals based on previous years. “It’s becoming more of an institution as people are more familiar with the gallery. We want to build that familiarity and that comfort.”

Frost works at ED Marketing by day and volunteers her time on Latitude 53’s events committee by night. She says she has learned practical skills from participating in professional groups like Latitude. “I think in any group where you get to experience something new and get involved with new people you’re always going to be learning. Latitude does a great job of involving people and giving them a hands-on experience. I think with any hands-on experience you’re going to be learning something.”

While Frost and her fellow volunteers at Latitude pour drinks and usher attendees from the art gallery onto the patio. Members of the Junior Chamber International are circling trays of hors d’oeuvres through the crowd. JCI Edmonton, a professional group of young executives, sponsored the series and helped coordinate with the restaurants who supplied the food for the night. More than just free food, the event is staffed with volunteers both from the art gallery and from JCI. The stress, and the satisfaction, of organizing a well-attended event like the Rooftop Patio Series is not something members of JCI or Latitude 53 learnt from a book. Participating in committees and community organizations like JCI – members say – has given them a hands-on education and additional career boost that simply can’t be taught in a classroom.

“I wanted to learn new things and get out there and have new experiences, and that’s what JCI is all about,” says Eric Brown, an investment advisor for ScotiaMcLeod.

Not that members don’t already have a formal education. Brown for instance, studied for his anthropology and classics degree at the University of Alberta before working his way into the banking and finance sector. Sitting with a latte shortly after the financial markets close, Brown reveals that after the first years of his formal education had ended he made two strategic moves. He enrolled, studied for and passed the Canadian Securities Course and the Conduct and Practices Handbook to break into the world of financial services. But he also found JCI and began developing and learning hands-on business soft skills, networking skills and gaining experiences organizing and contributing to events like the Rooftop Patio Series.

“When I first started off I was a little bit shy. I still remember my first networking event I went there and stood by myself in the corner. But everyone there was so friendly, walking up and introducing themselves. I’ve learned to build meaningful contacts, The additional business savvy that he’s learned since starting out in his financial career he credits to his involvement with JCI.

When asked if he has learned and gained experiences from his involvement with JCI that couldn’t be taught in a book, he says, “Absolutely.” Brown was one of the volunteers circling trays of hors d’oeuvres through the rooftop patio on Thursday nights through the summer. “It’s given me more confidence for speaking in front of a group, for going up to people that I’ve never met before and for a network of people around the city.”

Described as a “worldwide federation of young leaders and entrepreneurs,” JCI stands for Junior Chamber International. The group organizes speaking events, networking events, conferences and community workshops. Members also host teaching seminars with Junior Achievement where they teach students as young as Grade 3 about money management and the basics of personal finance.

“Some of the speakers that we invite are pretty prominent business people, so just being able to meet these people and interact with them. That’s the kind of connection that I need to be able to make at Scotia,” he says.

Looking back on his career, John Stobbe, a former JCI member and past-president of the Edmonton chapter, says that his involvement in professional groups has given his career a boost. “What it did is it gave me experience: experience running projects,” he says of his time volunteering with JCI. In the past year, Stobbe was made a senator of JCI and he continues to be involved. “I think these kinds of groups are really useful to anybody doing projects and trying to get ahead in their own career and getting connected in the community.”

He recalls one project where the club was able to attract huge numbers of people to University of Alberta’s landmark, “the Butterdome,” for a JCI event. “It was a huge motivational seminar where we had like 5,000 people together over at the Butterdome,” he recalls. “Putting things together like that, as a junior person in any organization, you may have to wait 10 years to do something like that. Whereas at an organization like JCI, you get to handle projects like that early on in your career.”

Handling projects like a motivational speech at the Butterdome or the Rooftop Patio Series downtown comes with both the stresses of organizing and promoting the event but also the joys of success. Brown is hard at work organizing JCI’s national convention which will be held in Edmonton this Sept. 22-26. Frost is preparing for one final instalment of the rooftop patio series Sept. 16. Though the series was supposed to end in August, popular demand has brought life to Latitude 53’s rooftop patio one more time this fall.

Our two debaters are George Siemens, an author and professor who works in the field of open education and Max Fawcett, Managing Editor at our sister magazine Alberta Venture, writer of the article New School this month and all-round skeptical person.

Question: Where do you see the value in opening up classrooms to the world through the concepts of open teaching and Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs)?

To learn more about MOOC’s read this article by Emily Senger and the Open Education Primer.

Max’s opening volley:

I think there’s value in opening up the black box of higher education, but that it’s ultimately limited in nature. There’s a huge difference between knowledge and information, and while massively open online courses (MOOCs) might satisfy the demand for the latter I’m skeptical about their ability to do much to produce more of the former.

Education, after all, isn’t an acquisitive process, an exercise in procuring and storing information. Instead, learning is a social process, one in which people get from point A – ignorance – to point B – enlightenment – through a messy combination of challenge, failure and consolidation. While there might be a few people who can (and should) take advantage of open-source learning models, there are, I suspect, far more who can’t. Information, in the absence of the ability to apply it, isn’t very valuable, as anybody who’s ever tried to fix their own car using only the supplied factory manual understands only too well.

More important, I think, is the fact that concepts of open teaching and MOOCs marginalize the role of the teacher and the importance of the act – the art – of teaching. In my experience good teachers aren’t so much conduits of information (as the MOOC model implies) as they are mediums of it, essential participants in the dynamic process of learning rather than passive instruments in transmission of information. And teaching, for better or worse, is a corporeal activity that can’t be replicated with the suite of technologies to which we have access today. Until we find the tools that allow us to replicate the classroom experience in an online environment, MOOCs will remain simulacra, hollow and atonal echoes of what the educational process is really about.

George’s reply:

MOOCs, in contrast to traditional education, require engaged, active, and participative learners. In open courses, learners encounter fellow learners from other countries and other disciplines (in CCK08, we had dozens of countries represented). An open course requires students to comment, to create, and to engage with others. Passivity reduces the quality of learning as most learning occurs in the process of doing, creating, sharing, and dialoguing. The model is particularly effective because it utilizes social and information sharing methods that many individuals are familiar with in their personal lives. Social networked learning has a long history – information flows in social networks, parents teach their children, masters teach apprentices. Many of the technologies available today augment this natural human social capacity and MOOCs are particularly valuable in this regard. The sound bite phrase you use to conclude your statement – “hollow and atonal echoes” – is quite lovely. However, you are casting it at MOOCs when your target should be the existing university lecture and test models

Max’s reply:

George, I’m admittedly a bit out of my depth here, and my views on the subject aren’t nearly as battle-tested as yours. But from where I sit, the difference between information and knowledge lies in the ability to apply it effectively. We have all kinds of access to information today, to the point where it’s very nearly overwhelming. But when it comes to knowledge, I’m not sure that we’re any better off than our parents were a generation or two ago.

My sense of MOOCs is that they’re driven by the same if-you-build-it-they-will-come logic that is at the heart of W.P. Kinsella’s “Field of Dreams.” But while his field of dreams had a happy ending, I’m not sure I see the same attraction, the same winding highway of blinking headlights headed towards the virtual classrooms of MOOCs. I think there will be people who derive a great deal of pleasure and purpose out of them, just as there are amateur astronomers out there working outside the traditional professional boundaries of their field. For these sorts of enthusiasts, MOOCs are a wonderful resource. But they are outliers, and their enjoyment of MOOCs doesn’t change the fact that for the rest of us such a model is fundamentally unworkable.

I suppose my biggest problem with MOOCs, aside from their limited applicability, is the marginal role that they designate for the teacher or instructor. Teachers play an invaluable role in the conversion of information to knowledge, and while there are certainly problems with the education system as its currently configured – large classrooms, non-existent student-teacher relationships, degree-factory atmosphere – it’s a mistake, I think, to conflate those flaws with the system itself. The solution lies in returning the focus to teaching, and creating an environment in which they can do their jobs most effectively. I’m not sure that MOOCs are that kind of environment.

_____________________

This is the end of the first portion of the debate. On September 8 I will ask a new question of our two debaters and I’d love to draw the question from the comments. I’d also love to hear what you have to say about the opening question and feel free to give your opinion on subsequent questions as well.

Question: Where do you see the value in opening up classrooms to the world through the concepts of open teaching and Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs)?

The first school had homemade wooden desks and seats. An iron box stove, using long billets of wood, heated the room.

Mr. Richard Secord, who recently passed away, was our first teacher. He was very strict and made liberal use of heavy willow switches to keep our minds on our work

One of the lessons taught to the beginner was: “Is it an ox?—It is an ox.” The teacher taught us numbers by moving coloured pieces of wood on wire attached to a wooden frame. Old Ontario readers were used by the classes. For writing we used slates and slate pencils. Scribblers were then unheard of.

—Alex McCauley recalling school life in Edmonton in the 1880s. (Kostek 1992)

I’m broadcasting, from my iPhone, live on Ustream.

—@gcouros, posted to Twitter.com, August 25, 2010

Whereas Richard Secord might have prepared for the start of another school year by piling up billets of wood or picking out the right willow switch, George Couros (@gcouros) is preparing by experimenting with live Internet broadcasting from his iPhone.

Couros is the principal of Forest Green Elementary School, in Stony Plain, Alberta and one of many teachers who are connecting with other teachers around the world using social media.

The work of teachers has changed dramatically since McCauley’s time, but the changes occurring now as a result of technology are profound. In particular, online networking allows teachers to advance their professional practice and improve the quality of educational outcomes by connecting with colleagues directly from their desktops or mobile phones.

Couros started blogging last year to provide leadership to his teachers on how blogging and social networking can be applied to educational settings. This year, students at Forest Green will begin producing online journals called blogfolios to demonstrate their learning and to showcase their schoolwork.

“We’re really focussed on critical thinking and looking at different perspectives,” says Couros. “I think that through blogging you have that continuous reflection.”

Students as young as kindergarten will start posting to blogs this year and will keep posting throughout their time at Forest Green.

Cold Lake High School media arts teacher Jared Nichol (@mrnichol) also sees the power of blogs for reflection. He uses his blog Journeys in 2.0 Teaching to reflect on his teaching practice.

At the end of each day, Nichol records his thoughts on how lessons went and how they could be improved next time. He will refer to previous blog posts when planning lessons to ensure that his practice is constantly evolving. He also gets great value by reading ideas and feedback left by other colleagues in the comments on his blog.

“If you’re an early adopter or a keener, then you’re kind of on a technology island; you think you are the only one. So connecting to other people who are thinking the same and doing the same and sharing the same, that’s huge,” says Nichol.

Nichol says the real engagement is on the social networking and microblogging service Twitter and points to how people involved in education use it. For example, Alberta Minister of Education Dave Hancock (@DaveHancockMLA) is a regular user of Twitter and regularly participates in discussions marked with the hashtag #ABEd.

“I call it my bat phone to the minister of education,” says Nichol, noting that he can post a question for the government and often get a response within a day

Achieving change in the education system is the goal of another Alberta teacher who is connecting online. Joe Bower (@joe_bower) teaches Grade 6 at Normandeau Elementary School, in Red Deer. He also authors For the Love of Learning, a blog focussed on revamping assessment in Alberta’s schools. He advocates abolishing homework and grading in lieu of more authentic assessment activities, like the blogfolios being introduced by Couros.

Teachers like Bower are convinced that this type of assessment demonstrates student understanding and growth more effectively than traditional exams and assignments.

Like most teachers who are interacting online, Bower is impressed by the opportunities to connect with others around the world. Recently, while listening to renowned Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg, Bower sent a tweet to a colleague in Finland. He was able to confirm that multiple-choice tests are rarely used in assessment there, before Sahlberg was even done giving his talk.

“My personal learning network is growing every day,” says Bower, who has nearly 2,000 followers on Twitter.

“This is the best form of professional development I have taken part in. It’s not only supremely effective and efficient, but it’s also cheap. It’s the best of both worlds.”

Bower is also bringing his experiences from collaborating online into the classroom. He has used Twitter during conferences and seminars as a backchannel to communicate with other delegates. Now he plans to bring that utility into his classroom by mounting a flat screen monitor in his room to display the comments of his students while they watch a video or participate in a lesson.

“Instead of it just being a Planet Earth video 1.0 where the kids just ‘sit and get’ alone in a crowd, now the kids are watching and they can interact through Twitter, and there is actually some learning and interaction happening while the video is playing.”

The Twitter wall not only enhances the learning value for the students, but it also becomes an assessment tool for Bower. These types of assessments for learning are conducted in such a way that the students learn while the teacher assesses what they are learning.

“The best forms of assessment are done while the kids are still learning,” says Bower.

It’s tough to say what types of tools 1880s teacher Richard Secord used to assess learning, but it’s good to know that if he were in a school today he wouldn’t be isolated and dependent on “Old Ontario readers.”

Of course, if he were in a school today he might be more concerned with figuring out how to download the Willow Switch app.

References

Kostek, M. A. 1992. A Century and Ten: The History of Edmonton Public Schools. Edmonton, Alta.: Edmonton Public Schools.

Flip through any high school yearbook and you will invariably locate them. Sandwiched between the frumpy girl with big glasses and the awkward-looking boy with tousled hair. Sprinkled amid the teenage world of locker bays, cheerleaders, jocks and moody kids smoking pot underneath football-field bleachers stand the class clowns, smart-asses and ne’er-do-wells.

Under favourite memories they might list mooning the gym teacher. Career aspirations are adroitly limited to getting rich and, simply, if a little mysteriously, cheese. Seldom will you read about their career trajectories in the business pages of a national newspaper. In conversation, accounts of their lives will take on the tones of a cautionary tale rather than an inspirational speech. Dave Arnold might fall into this camp except for one detail: He was kicked out of high school long before graduation day. “I was getting zeroes in every single course, because I wasn’t doing anything,” he recalls. “I was just farting around.”

Today, the 29-year-old visual artist ekes out a living in Montreal, painting storefront windows with hand-lettered signs. In many ways, his is a tale of contradictions. His resume, for one, reads like an almanac of terrible choices. There was the stint as a plumber’s assistant, another as a dish washer at a diner-chain owned by Celine Dion, followed by a gig at a deli and after that a stretch apprenticing as a carpenter. “After a couple of years of stuff like that I realized this is what people were warning me about. These are the kinds of jobs a high school dropout gets.”

Yet there’s something to Arnold’s story. It successfully throws a giant spanner in the popular narrative of dropouts, the one where they end up working as grunts in lumber camps, on oil rigs or else wind up on the side of milk cartons in grainy black-and-white photos. Can a perennial shit-disturber make good in the world? The short answer may be yes, but the longer response is, in Arnold’s case, unorthodox.

“When I was messing around in school, it wasn’t to make a point, or because I thought I could do things my way. I think it was just the entertainment value of trying to turn myself into the centre of attention, just for my own kicks.”

Indeed, his departure from academia had as much to do with lousy grades as a perverse talent for infuriating school officials. Take his unceremonious departure from the high school art program. For years leading up to his expulsion, Arnold had been driving the art teachers at his suburban high school mad. Whatever project they assigned, he completed. But his participation came with a caveat: from Grade 9 through to Grade 11, a fascination with scatological humor would inform nearly everything he drew, designed or built. He sullied lessons in three-point perspective and ruined classes on Roman aesthetics. Pastel drawings were tainted, classic paintings debased. Finally, exasperated with his pupil’s capacity for filth, the last in a string of art teachers gave up. “Technically you’re quite skilled, but you cannot keep doing this,” he pleaded. “You’re in Grade 11 now. We want you to step it up.”

Any normal student would have got the message. But temptation is a tricky stimulus. The assignment that pushed the faculty to the brink began simply enough. Build a set of Russian doll-inspired shapes – just the thing to get a wayward student on the right track. Almost immediately, though, Arnold resolved to design, sculpt and fire a cartoonish pile of dog droppings using clay. In keeping with the Russian-doll theme, the project would consist of one Dairy Queen-like swirl inside another inside another. As cover for his deceit, he spent class hours building a simple series of cubes, each smaller than the other so that they fit together snugly. At home, he worked into the night on his secret masterpiece, eventually converting his family’s oven into a kiln so he could glaze and fire the sculpture in anticipation of “mark day.”

Disbelief does not begin to describe the look on the teacher’s face when he spotted the lumpy – though technically sound – fecal statuette. “It was the most priceless thing I’ve ever seen,” Arnold recalls, chuckling at the memory. “He couldn’t compute what he was looking at.” The school’s principal and vice-principal were equally stunned. “They couldn’t understand what would make a person do this.” True to their word, school officials expelled their stubborn charge from the art program. Eventually, they kicked him out of school altogether.

It wasn’t until Arnold fell in with a local carpenter that the word education took on any tangible meaning. He found the immediate rewards of framing a house, or helping renovate a kitchen far outweighed the more ethereal perks of acing an English paper or math test. “I think that’s where I actually started paying attention to what people smarter than me were saying.”

Still, the wages were lousy and the work was backbreaking. In the fall of 2004, fed up with carpentry, Arnold moved with a handful of friends from Toronto to Montreal. They set up shop in a converted loft and slept in homemade beds. While his companions focused on growing a boutique design agency based in Montreal’s trendy Plateau district, the terrible jobs kept piling up for Arnold. “The first winter was a nightmare of living on hotdogs and processed cheese,” he says.

Perhaps inevitably, he fell back on drawing and a childhood obsession with Archie comics. (Whatever his shortcomings in the classroom, Arnold had been doodling from an early age. Teachers rarely doubted that he knew his way around a black-tipped pen). That led to a series of gallery installations, including one titled Teenage Nudes, which more or less consisted of sketches of Betty and Veronica in alluring poses. Shortly after, he parlayed a rudimentary skill with a paintbrush into designing storefront signs for local merchants. Clients to date include upscale Montreal restaurants and clothiers, a flagship Urban Outfitters store and, most recently, a mobile taco vendor. Says Arnold, “People are starting to notice that I have a bit of style that I’m doing – not because I’m aiming for a style, but I’m falling into the stuff I’m comfortable doing and I like doing.”

His advice to entrepreneurs, students and would-be dropouts is to keep an open mind. Don’t be afraid of pursuing new ideas, he adds. “And don’t get too depressed if they turn out to be terrible. Just try the next idea that shows up. That’s the approach that I’ve been running on, and it seems to work about 50 per cent of the time.”

Have you ever wondered what Jesse Lipsombe does during the day, that is when he isn’t making videos for Unlimited? Lipscombe runs a cool personal training outfit called PHAT Training. Here’s a little day in the life video of this boutique fitness shop.

You’re 20 years old. You’ve taken a couple years off from the world of education, but your parents and friends have convinced you that going back to school is the right thing to do. You sign up for Intro to Psych 101. You and 400 other students, by the way. You file into a massive lecture hall for an hour and a half class on the niceties of neuroscience and motivation

Now, imagine that instead of sitting passively in a crowded lecture hall you could watch an amazing video lecture on the same subject from Open Yale. Then you could book some time (through a handy web app, of course) to talk to an actual professor about the contents of the lecture and to discuss any problems you might have with the material.

Which of these sounds better to you?

Given the technology available today, opening up content and making it freely available just makes sense Why have a highly educated professor deliver the same lecture year after year? That can be addressed with technology. What tech can’t do is isolate the individual needs and preferences of each learner.

However, open content is only one part of the world of open education. George Siemens, an open education theorist, author and professor thinks that the very fabric of what we understand as education needs to be pulled apart. “What if we completely altered the structure of what learning is?” Siemens asks. “And what if you started to challenge the notion of what a course is? How would a course be different if we were to design a course today.”

Any educational innovation or technology leaves behind a legacy, one that reflects the needs that solution filled at the time. Classrooms, for example, are the legacy of the learning and teaching worlds 100 years ago. But what kind of ideology is embedded within the physical construction of a classroom?

“Walk into any university classroom and there will be rows and they’ll be facing one way,” says Siemens. “There are a few places where they are designing learning spaces that are movable, where you can at least swivel your chair to the person next to you. However, almost all of them have a central focus area up front where the teacher is. Educationally they still have the view that the important information is in one central location, namely at the front of the class, and that the information there is meant to be broadcast and shared with others further back in the audience.”

So if the classroom is broken, how do we fix it?

Open Content

In 2002, the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology launched a proof-of-concept site titled MIT OpenCourseWare. It offered 32 courses and their resources online to anyone who wished to access them. It is, as its own site describes it, “A web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.”

This was a vital first step in the move towards open educational content. Just the logistical challenges in 2002 of clearing intellectual property and setting up that kind of web infrastructure were massive. It now offers thousands of different classes worth of material. But if its application is new, the concept itself that was at the heart of MIT’s open education initiative isn’t. Public lectures have been around since there were lecterns to speak from behind and an audience who to wanted to listen. What changed was the technology.

Open Teaching

Open teaching is where the teacher invites the world into his classroom, an idea that is explored in more detail in Emily Senger’s article on Massively Open Online Courses.

Someone who has been involved in open teaching and open courses from the very beginning is Stephen Downes. A frizzy haired researcher and former philosophy professor, Downes works for the National Research Council of Canada out of Moncton, New Brunswick. He’s been involved in the field of online learning since 1995 where he worked with now charmingly defunct technologies like Telnet, text-based interfaces and CD-ROMs.

Downes has written programs using punch cards and used room-sized mainframe computers in the late 70s. He’s an early adopter, signing up for massive email courses in the 90s where he learned system administration and email networking basics. The man is a bona-fide geek.

Senger’s article goes into far more detail about MOOCs, but the approach behind them is intriguing enough to deserve a brief mention here as well. An open course that Downes and Siemens created was called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. It was a regular credit class at the University of Manitoba with 25 real-live students and 2300 online participants.

“The idea hasn’t really penetrated the mass mind yet. Universities aren’t calling me up to teach these classes, they’re asking him to come and talk about them because they’re curious,” says Downes. “The model has a core of people taking the class for credit but that core is working openly with a much larger body of people who are taking it out of interest.”

Taking a class purely out of interest? In a goal-driven culture raised on gold stars and crossing things off various to-do lists, this might seem like a tough sell.

Of the 2300 students 200 were active participants. An active participant is someone who publishes material or participates in the online discussions. The rest were lurkers, receiving daily updates.

This ratio of active participants to lurkers resembles the Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80-20 rule where roughly 80 per cent of effects come from 20 per cent of the causes.

Siemens had an interesting take on the participation rates. “It was more 90-10 and of that 10 per cent it was probably 1 per cent that were really active. However, we did find that people who took one course were more likely to participate and be more active in new courses.”

Is participating in one of these open classes a skill you should teach, or is the 80-20 rule just a reality of social systems? Siemens believes that more time should be spent on educating the public about this kind of interaction (think of what would happen in Youtube or newspaper comments) but acknowledges the veracity of the 80-20 rule.

Open teaching is a little more revolutionary than open content, but it’s not too far out there. Are students and teachers better off when they open up the learning process and allow interested parties to participate? Can classrooms turn into a place where the contributions of all learners are mashed up into something that is greater than the whole? With our society becoming a more open and transparent one, why keep what happens within a classroom stuck within those walls?

There is no one answer to these questions and given the fact that the 25 credit students and not the 2300 online participants were working towards an eventual degree this leads us to…

Open Accreditation

Degrees are a statement of quality and a commentary on competence. The person hiring you doesn’t have to know your teacher or what kind of person you are. Instead, they just have to trust the system and the institution that grants the degree. While this scales up nicely it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can be a useful contributor to society.

Open accreditation is the recognition of the interplay between formal and informal learning. The recognition of informal learning is already embedded within the post-secondary institions of several provinces in Canada through prior learning assessment and recognition programs. This is a process that helps adults demonstrate and obtrain recognition for learning they have acquired outside of a formal educational setting. Open accreditation merely takes the idea to its logical conclusion.

“Let’s say you’re active on Twitter and Facebook and eventually a group of people get to know you even though you aren’t necessarily an expert, don’t have a degree, you’re actively engaged in it, you’re talking about it, you’re writing about it. After a period of time you become an informal expert on those areas,” says Siemens.

Of course, you don’t have to be active in Twitter and Facebook to develop your reputation. Instead, you merely have be participating in any shared public social space. Degrees are recognition of what you did five-to-ten years ago, but your reputation is a recognition of what you’ve actually done and what you’re doing right now.

“Look at programmers. Tons of people who have constructed influential programs didn’t get a degree in programming. They’re producing something of value, people use it and it makes a difference. Their competence is determined by your reputation in that community,” says Siemens.

This is a bit out there. Of all the open education principles this one is the furthest away from the mainstream. Institutions aren’t going to be rushing to scrap one of their most important metrics in how they receive funding. Businesses expect them and society at large probably isn’t ready for it. However, we have to start having these conversations in order to progress.

Why care about open education?

Higher education seems stuck. The way that we interact socially and with information has changed drastically in the past 25 years and that change has not been reflected in the classroom.. Universities have remained static.

“The university system always interacted fairly tightly with the knowledge systems of society. What we’re seeing happen today is that universities are staying reasonably static and the information and social interactions in society are dramatically different than what you see in classrooms. Part of my interest is seeing in how you align the two,” Says Siemens.

While costs might be a wash (you’re always going to need trained humans and trained humans are expensive) the quality of the learning experience could be vastly improved with open education concepts. Our children could and should enjoy a vastly better educational experience than we did.

Of course, access to education is another powerful reason to examine these concepts. Making education accessible could be an incredibly powerful, democratizing force. Stephen Downes entered this field in order to make education accessible to anyone who wanted it.

“The whole reason I’m in this field at all is to increase access to education. For all of recorded human history, education has been proprietary to those who can afford it and I think that is a longstanding injustice. I think we have the capacity and the technology to change that but we also have to change the models and this is an effort to change that model.”

And while aligning post-secondary education with modern day technology and social interactions and educating more people are admirable aims there is a wider movement, a movement towards openness. Open source software, open data, open government, even open source tractors are currently being made.

“You’d need a very unique circumstance to argue that a closed system is better than an open one,” says Siemens.

Aside from ongoing murder investigations and daily troop movements in Afghanistan there’s precious little information that you can justify as keeping secret in our society. Our public institutions are obligated to tell us what they’re doing and now, with the technologies and frameworks that are being created, this is more possible than ever before.

Questions for readers

What do you think of open accreditation? Is reputation enough? In what jobs can you see open accreditation just not working?

Have you ever used open content? Is there anyone out there who is against open content?

Would you be interested in participating in a class with 200 other people participating in it online? How about 2000?

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Paying for post-secondary and graduate education is challenging. I know first-hand how it feels to be slapped with a $10,000 bill for tuition, books, and supplies each year.

When you choose to hit the books for two, three, four, or five years, you forfeit immediate income-earning opportunities; you’re typically not working full time. So while some of your friends are bringing home a nice paycheque each month, you’re doing just the opposite: spending money on education.

An undergraduate degree in Canada costs, on average, between $30,000 to $50,000. Graduate and doctorate programs can cost upward of $70,000 to $100,000. Most graduates leave post-secondary with at least $20,000 to $30,000 in student debt.

So, the underlying question is, is it worth it? The answer is “Yes!” Getting an education is exceptionally valuable. I’m not just talking about college and university. I’m also talking about trade, technical and apprenticeship programs. Your long-term income-earning ability is anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to over a million dollars greater than a high school graduate’s[1].

Research has shown that education is an incredibly valuable asset and a big part of developing a strong personal brand. Educated people not only earn more money, but also enjoy a higher quality of life because they have more choices in terms of their career opportunities and lifestyle.

Statistics Canada conducted the National Graduate’s Survey based on 2006 census data. Over a 40 year period, college grads are expected to earn $200,000 more than a high school grad, a Bachelor’s degree holder is expected to earn $745,000 more and a post-bachelor degree holder will earn $1.2 million more than a high school grad. [2]

The US Department of Labour and Census Bureau conduced a study in 2004 that suggested that 75 per cent of future jobs will require some type of post-secondary education. Additionally, they found that jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree would grow twice as fast as national average for other occupations.

If you know you’re going to hit the books, try saving for school in advance. Tuck away regular amounts of money through automatic bank deductions into a Guaranteed Investment Certificate, money market mutual fund or high interest savings account. Each is low risk, earns stable returns and can be accessed when the time comes to pay your fees. To make this even more beneficial, save within your Tax Free Savings Account so that your money can grow tax free.

Also, consider working while you’re going to school. Check with your current employer to see if they will be able to accommodate your school schedule. If you’ve done good work, companies will often want to keep you on part-time or even allow you to work remotely from wherever you go to school. Second, check out if there are any part-time jobs on campus. The libraries, restaurants, stores, fitness centres, and so on need staff. Within your own faculty there may be opportunities to help with academic research or various studies, or you could become a teaching assistant. Third, if you’re studying a particular subject like engineering or education, look for student-friendly employment within your field of expertise. This is a great way to apply what you’re learning and have employers test out your skills. Fourth, don’t forget about entrepreneurial ideas. If you’ve got a special skill such as photography or fitness training, use it to make money.

I’d recommend applying for scholarships. Your effort combined with the right qualifications can result in thousands of dollars of free educational money. The registrar’s office or library on your campus will have information on scholarships, bursaries, and income assistance.

Additionally, apply for government student loans. Student loans must be repaid in regular installments once you graduate. The interest rates are competitive and you can write off the interest after graduation. Student loans often have associated grants and bursaries which you can apply for. Visit Canada’s student loan website for general student loan information www.canlearn.ca. If you don’t qualify for scholarships, student loans, grants and bursaries, pay for school through a student line of credit. Lines of credit are available through most financial institutions and have highly competitive interest rates with flexible repayment plans.

Yes, there are very successful people in North America who don’t have post-secondary education. But this phenomenon is becoming less common because the corporate cultural norm has changed: education is critical.

[2] http://www.millenniumscholarships.ca/images/Publications/090623_POK1_backgrounder_EN.pdf

In spite of Prince’s protestations to the contrary, the Internet is anything but dead. In fact, it’s been the one doing most of the killing of late. From enforceable copyright to respectful disagreements and the ability to listen to an album from front to back, the internet has left a litany of dead or dying cultural trends in its digital wake. But while some of these cultural casualties will be mourned, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who will miss the repetitive intellectual strains associated with rote learning.

It wasn’t that long ago that rote learning, and the regurgitative mimickery that is its most common form of expression, was the educational model under which students laboured during their primary and secondary years. They were expected to behave like inert intellectual vessels into which a series of teachers would dump ever-more complex packets of information and ideas, like computers receiving their regular software upgrades. But with the rise of the Google-powered universe and the ability to locate information about anything, anytime and (almost) anywhere, the need to remember the dates of the Hundred Years War or the name of Canada’s fourth Prime Minister has become an academic skill nearly as quaint – and irrelevant – as using an abacus or perfecting one’s ability to write in script.

“I don’t think the world needs more people who can play Trivial Pursuit, if you know what I mean,” says Chris McCullough, a Red Deer teacher. “There’s a place for that, but at the same time the world’s changing so fast in terms of what you can and can’t do. I think the schools need to reflect that.” In order to do that, schools need to – and are, increasingly – move away from the traditional memory-oriented model of education and towards a more dynamic and interactive one. Likewise, the role of the teacher must evolve, McCullough says, from that of a Socratic fount of wisdom to a tour guide to its possibilities. Making kids memorize names and numbers when they know perfectly well that they could just look it up on the internet is an exercise in mutual frustration, according to McCullough.

Tracy Lyons, the vice-principal of a high school in Onoway, Alberta, describes the move away from rote learning as nothing less than a paradigm shift for her entire profession. “We’re not sages on the stage anymore; it’s a different way of looking at things. It adds a kind of accountability, in that teachers are now forced to constantly be aware of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.” But it’s not all toil and trouble, either, she explains. “There’s a fun factor here, too. You can be so creative in what you do and how you do it, and it might look different from classroom to classroom and community to community. It really opens doors, yet at the same time it really reinforces what’s important.”

What’s important, Lyons says, is the school system’s ability – and willingness – to provide kids with the kind of intellectual tools that they’ll need to thrive in the 21st century. “There’s a push towards big question, big idea-thinking about things, and looking at process as opposed to just content,” she says. “There’s a real push for inquiry-based thinking, critical thinking, and collaboration. It’s about really paying attention to where the kids are, rather than ‘this is the box that we teach from.’

Of course, not everyone is quite as enthusiastic about the demise of rote as Lyons is. “It’s a personal thing,” Lyons says, “and everybody’s at different stages, just like our kids. Some teachers like the way things have always been. Change is a difficult thing.” But McCullough believes that reluctant adopters will find the benefits far outweigh whatever costs might be associated with the adjustment period. “From a teacher planning perspective, I guess that could be a little scary,” he says. “But 99 per cent of teachers are in it for those ‘a ha!’ moments where they’ve piqued someone’s interest or made someone interested in something. That’s why teachers teach. So when that happens, and they can see that the helped facilitate that, you have a very powerful situation happening.”

For Sir Ken Robinson, a renowned education expert and public speaker, that situation can’t unfold soon enough. In a recent TED talk on the subject of education in the 21st century, Robinson described the dangers associated with traditional approaches to education. “We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it,” he said. “Or, more precisely, we’re educated out of it.” He describes the western education model as a tool – and a blunt one, at that – of industry and commerce, one that does more to enrich those in positions of power than the students themselves. “The consequence,” he said, “is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think that they’re not, because the thing that they were good at in school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized. I think we can’t afford to go on that way. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

That process is already underway, it seems, if Lyons and McCullough and their attitude towards alternative approaches to education are any indication. And while traditionalists might bemoan the end of the test-obsessed, memorization-oriented approach to education under which they were schooled, Lyons thinks that they’re the ones that are truly out of touch. The kids, in other words, are just fine. “There’s that whole idea that there’s something wrong, and our kids are not the way they should be. You know what? Things are changing so much and so quickly, and it’s us, the adults, that aren’t keeping up. I really think we need to take that step back and try to realize that it’s not them that need to change, it’s us.”

In a traditional university setting, a student pays to register for a course. The student shows up. A professor hands out an outline, assigns readings, stands at the front and lectures. Students take notes and ask questions. Then there is a test or an essay.

But with advancing online tools innovative educators are examining new ways to break out of this one-to-many model of education, through a concept called massively open online courses. The idea is to use open-source learning tools to make courses transparent and open to all, harnessing the knowledge of anyone who is interested in a topic.

George Siemens, along with colleague Stephen Downes, tried out the open course concept in fall 2008 through the University of Manitoba in a course called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, or CCK08 for short. The course would allow 25 students to register, pay and receive credit for the course. All of the course content, including discussion boards, course readings, podcasts and any other teaching materials, was open to anyone who had an internet connection and created a user profile.

“The course was the platform, but anyone could build on that platform however they wanted,” says Siemens. “There’s this notion that technology is networked and social. It does alter the power relationship between the educator and the learner, a learner has more autonomy, they have more control. The expectation that you wait on the teacher to create everything for you and to tell you what to do is false.”

Course facilitators, Siemens and Downes, gave learners control over how they learned. Each student was encouraged to create their online networks, using the forum that appealed to them: Moodle (an online learning software) personal blogging, RSS feeds, Second Life, Facebook, podcasts, YouTube videos – if something was missing from the course, the course facilitators encouraged students to create it.

The concept was enough to lure in D’Arcy Norman, an educational technology consultant at the University of Calgary, who described himself as a “lurker” in CCK08. He was one of the 2,300 students who signed up for a free account that would allow him to access class documents, receive emails from the facilitators and participate in online class discussions.

In his day job, Norman helps U of C staff with technology and online teaching methods and he is researching educational technology for a master’s degree, so the course fit with his interests and he signed up out of curiosity after reading a blog post about it. When the course got underway, Norman did some of the readings, but he didn’t write any of the three assigned papers, nor did he complete the final project.

“Because I was one of the lurkers, it was come and go,” says Norman. “When you have time, you do the readings and then when you don’t, or when it doesn’t sound interesting, you just don’t do it. It’s a very free-form kind of thing. When you say you participated in the course, it might not be in the traditional sense.”

Norman was one of the more passive participants, while others participated fully, doing all the reading and the assignments, without receiving recognized credit for their work. The instructors only marked papers and the final project from for-credit students, but others were free to post papers on the course website for other students to view and comment on.

Siemens estimates about 10 per cent of those 2,300 students were active participants. Even with only 10 per cent, traffic could get heavy on some of the online discussion threads.

“At the beginning, we had quite a number of students feeling quite overwhelmed because you would get 200 or 300 posts going into a discussion forum per day and that’s just about impossible to follow,” Siemens says.

As the course progressed, the initial flurry of posts became more manageable, says Lisa Lane, a history teacher at MiraCosta College in Southern California who was one of the 25 registered participants in the class. Lane says she didn’t have a problem finding her niche in the online course, by using a blog, Twitter and the online discussion forum. Other students did the same, using the hashtag #CCK08 on Twitter to discuss and post links to their blogs.

“I’m really good at drawing attention to myself as needed,” Lane says, laughing. “I’m not exactly a wallflower.” But, Lane sees how other participants in an online course might have a problem finding their way, especially if they weren’t already familiar with the technology.

“You have people in there who were really interested, but they were afraid to explore the technologies that were being used and they got lost,” Lane says. “There were people who just disappeared because they couldn’t figure out how to get in the Moodle or how to set up their own blog.” The other challenge with learning in such an open environment, she says, is that people might be afraid to put their ideas online to, potentially, 2,300 students.

Even if students in massively open online courses master the technology and overcome their virtual stage fright, a third problem remains: how to recognize the value of a learning experience that isn’t for credit. Even through Lane is an advocate of open courses, she had to officially register for the course through the University of Manitoba in order for her credits to be recognized by the college she works at.

“If you’re in a business and you’re a young professional and you want to take an open class, how do you get your superiors to respect that, and say ‘Wow, that’s really good professional development. We should put that in your personnel file,’” Lane questions. “If it’s open and everyone can drop in and drop out, it’s just not seen in the same way.”

It’s a question that proponents of online education continue to grapple with. Even if a student in an open course gains from their experience, there is no guarantee that the boss, or a potential employer, will recognize their learning without a certificate or other official, institution-approved record to prove it.

Wend Drexler, a professor and grant administrator at the University of Florida who also took Siemen’s class as a for-credit student, says that as more professors are posting their content online, figuring out how to recognize non-credit learning will continue to be an issue. For example, much of the course material at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is available through its MIT OpenCourseWare site, which was named one of the 50 Best Websites of 2010 by Time magazine.

“You could really piece together a good undergraduate education based on what’s available out there, but how do you prove to an employer that you have done that?” Drexler questions. “I don’t know, but it’s something that everyone is trying to work through.”

For this reason, Norman says that open classes appeal to people like him who are self-motivated and ready to learning for learning’s sake, not because they are going to receive recognition at the end.

“It comes down to the motivation,” Norman says. “Are you intrinsically motivated person who does things because you’re interested? Or do you do things because you want the gold star. If you’re motivated by the gold star, then this probably isn’t interesting to you.”

Click here to see Wendy Drexler’s final project for Connectivism and Connective Knowledge.

The current K-12 educational system exists, generally speaking, for two primary reasons. First, its scalability makes it easy for the state to educate its citizens, and second, it gives children and teens a shared public space where they learn to interact with others and hopefully pick up some societal norms.

According to Alberta Education, of the just over 600,000 K-12 students in Alberta, just under 10,000 of them are home-schooled. The percentage of home-schooled children compared to children in a typical school environment comes to just 1.4 per cent. Home-schooling, at this point in time, is simply not a mainstream activity.

Drill down even farther within the home-schooling crowd, though, and you come to un-schooling, a minority within a minority. Why should you care about this tiny community of people with some pretty borderline-crazy ideas? Because, funnily enough, it might be a singularly amazing and fulfilling way to educate your young children.

“To be perfectly honest, most days I feel like I’m getting away with something big,” says Theresa Shea, a 47-year-old Edmonton-based writer and proud un-schooler of her three children aged 8, 10 and 12. “I think people would be surprised at how good the life is.”

So what is it? Un-schooling is a slippery concept, and it defies easy explanation. The Unschooling.com website has a page dedicated strictly to the different definitions of the practice, and it features over 20 interpretations.

Put simply, though, un-schooling is learning without the trappings of a formal schooling arrangement. It is the act of trusting your child’s natural curiosity to teach them what they need to know. This is not to say that you abandon your children at the playground and pick them up at the end of the day, mind you. Instead, the parent plays a critical role as a resource who is there to answer questions, to talk with and to provide support.

Writers and thinkers have explored this approach to education for some time. Influential books in the un-schooling canon include Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich and a suite of books by author John Holt. Holt, who has been credited with the creation of the word un-schooling, wrote How Children Fail, How Children Learn and his final book Learning All the Time: How small children begin to read, write, count, and investigate the world, without being taught.

Shea, who lives in the community of Millcreek in Edmonton, is part of a clutch of families un-schooling their children in that neighborhood. She didn’t have a grand home-schooling plan. When her oldest was five she still had two younger children in the house and didn’t relish the thought of getting him to kindergarten and back twice a day, so they nixed attending kindergarten.

“Grade 1 came. We thought that was nice. Let’s skip grade 1,” says Shea. From there Shea went down the path to un-schooling all of her children.

People frequently laugh off the formative influence of formal schooling on children. References to the school of hard knocks or real life experience are plentiful in success stories, especially in Western Canada. However, it’s worthwhile to examine the conditioning that comes into play in alternative schooling arrangements.

One day, as Shea was watching her children play soccer from the sidelines, she started talking to this cute-as-a-button eight-year-old named Kate. Being polite, Kate asked Shea where her kids went to school. When Shea told Kate that her kids didn’t go to school the little girl’s big blue eyes welled up with panic. “But how will they learn?” said Kate, in all of her eight-year-old sincerity.

This little anecdote is funny, but it’s also incredibly common. If someone told you they were unschooling their children what would your first reaction be?

Well, it turns out the children involved learn just fine. Shea’s children never did phonics or memorized the alphabet, but still they learned to read on their own.

Last year Shea’s son wanted to do more math so, deviating from the strict un-schooling line of thought, they placed him in an online math course.

“He did an entire year of curriculum in 3 months,” Shea says. In one year, he’s gone through 2 ½ years of math.

Brenda Baradoy is a grandmother from Calgary and is a co-owner of Canadian Home Education Resources, along with her husband. She home-schooled her own children, and during that process saw a business opportunity in selling educational books and materials to home-schooling families. She meets, talks to and interacts with plenty of home-schoolers every week.

Baradoy puts un-schoolers on one end of the home-schooling spectrum and the “textbook and let’s sit down and do school between 8 and 4” on the other.

“It can be a valid way of teaching. It depends on the parent, but that’s like any form of education. If you’re just letting the children play and there’s no parent involvement you’re going to run into problems,” says Baradoy.

“I’ve seen some who’ve done amazingly well and I’ve seen some that have been a disaster. It depends on the parent’s involvement and the resources you make available to your child.”

Given the demands it places on parents, un-schooling is not a solution for the majority of the population. It requires a flexible work schedule and deeply committed parents. More importantly, perhaps, the parents have to guard against bringing their own ideology into the process, and find ways to make up for the social interaction that the children miss out on when compared to their public school peers.

“I don’t think the unschooling life is for everyone, just as I don’t think any particular life would make everybody happy,” says Shea.

Not surprisingly, the most contentious element of the un-schooling process revolves around the question of socialization. Will children be socialized properly in an unschooling process, or will they turn into nose-picking little monsters who get along better with imaginary friends than real ones?

It’s hard to say but one thing that will make the process easier is having the community that Shea does with several other families unschooling their children in the same neighborhood.

Still, Shea believes passionately that she’s made the right choice for her children. “Home-schooling has this air of preciousness about it. There is this notion that it’s not the real world. School is less the real world than un-schooling,” says Shea.

So, would you unschool your children?