Serendipity35

When I interviewed for an instructional designer position with Google a few years ago, I was convinced that they were looking to take their Classroom product wider and deeper. I thought that they were ready to take on Blackboard, Canvas et al and start to integrate their free LMS with student information systems, add a gradebook etc.  Mixed in with all their existing tools for video streaming (YouTube) and conferencing (Hangouts) plus Docs and the rest, I really expected them to offer a free LMS that colleges would use. It would be very tempting. Look at how many colleges switched over to Gmail as the official institutional mail system. 

"Nontraditional" learning management systems (I'm thinking of both paid and free ones) have increased in online courses. Much of that movement has come from MOOC use and also from companies who have created their own systems to promote training and course offerings.

A new article from EDUCAUSE looks at graduate student use of Google Classroom. If you were using Classroom for your course a few years ago, you were more likely to be teaching in K-12 than at the undergraduate or graduate levels.

The study looks at many of the areas that have been studied before: improving effectiveness, increasing students' interactions with each other and their instructors and building community online. The difference is the audience of grad students.

The earliest MOOCs were using nontraditional web applications like Facebook and Twitter for higher education. But their use has been more limited - perhaps for an assignment - and few educators would call any one of them or a combination to be the equivalent of an LMS.

The study also points out that products like Schoology have borrowed a lot of UI and design from sites like Facebook. 

This study is small - "When asked if they would use Google Classroom again, five of the seven participants said, "yes." I would consider using Google Classroom again as well, but only for a small course."  But it is a study worth conducting at other institutions and with larger classes, even MOOC-sized ones. 

The author, Stephanie Blackmon, feels "the stream can be a bit daunting for some students" and she is hesitant to rely on it for larger classes. I would be less hesitant, but I don't think Classroom is ready to be the nontraditional LMS for a traditional college-credit course.

But some company, perhaps Google, is going to offer that free LMS and that's when things will really get interesting.

 

 

An overview of Google Classroom features:

This is a brief followup to my previous article about BitTorrent. That is because this post is about SciHub, which is self-described as "the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers".

Sci-Hub is a website with over 62,000,000 academic papers and articles available for direct download, bypassing publisher paywalls by allowing access through educational institution proxies. Sci-Hub stores papers in its own repository, and additionally the papers downloaded by Sci-Hub are also stored in Library Genesis (LibGen). A Russian graduate student, Alexandra Elbakyan, founded it in 2011, as a reaction to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls.

The site has had its legal problems. In 2015 academic publisher Elsevier filed a legal complaint against Sci-Hub alleging copyright infringement and the subsequent lawsuit led to a loss of the original sci-hub.org domain.  legal to even access http://sci-hub.io/ 

"If Elsevier manages to shut down our projects or force them into the darknet, that will demonstrate an important idea: that the public does not have the right to knowledge," says founder Alexandra Elbakyan in an interview with TorrentFreak.  

Elbakyan has been called a hero and "spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz for her creation of Sci-Hub and compared to Edward Snowden, because she is hiding in Russia after having "leaked" files in violation of American law.

Is she a modern-day "Robin Hood of science?"

This month, panOpen announced that it is partnering with Instructure to integrate panOpen's OER-based learning platform into the Canvas learning management system. This is important because it furthers the use of Open Educational Resources, and it is something to watch as it moves OER deeper into the commercial side of higher education. 

I'm not opposed to this move. It reminds me of how open source software - such as another LMS, Moodle - became a platform you could purchase through a partner who would host it and manage it for a school. It was ten years ago that I wrote here about bringing Moodle to my university. I had done a presentation on the process which I had initiated in 2005 and compared it to kittens. "It's free - like free kittens." That phrase came back to me in looking at the panOpen website where they say this about OER being free:

"Educational content that is licensed under a Creative Commons license is free to use and share. Depending on the CC license, one may also be able edit and create derivative versions. If there is a cost to OER, it is not for the underlying content but for the technology and support services that enhance them to create more compelling learning tools. As is commonly noted in open source software, OER are free like puppies not like beer. It takes some effort to make sure they’re healthy and strong. Even so, when there’s a fee associated with OER it’s typically a small fraction of the cost of conventional textbooks."

Instructure's Canvas is probably the fastest growing LMS in the marketplace today, so this partnership has the potential to make real inroads. Is OER entering the mainstream? Are they being viewed as a compelling alternative to commercial content?

I was quite charmed last year when I made my first visit to Prague in the Czech Republic. I had in my mind a Romanticized version of the city and its famed café culture. In my imagination, it was people sipping coffee on sidewalk table and talking about art and literature. When my wife and I went for coffee and dessert at the Café Imperial, it was certainly much grander than anything I had imagined.

We did find those little cafés too, so I was able to embrace my Romantic version of the city. There is also the well-documented role of  the coffeehouse in the Age of Enlightenment. These informal gatherings of people played an important role in innovation in politics, science, literature and religion.

Next year, I hope to visit the Café de Flore which is one of the oldest coffeehouses in Paris. Located at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue Saint-Benoît, it is known for its history of serving intellectual clientele. At one time, those tables overheard conversations from existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre,  writer Albert Camus and artist Pablo Picasso.

In science, breakthroughs seem to rarely come from just one person working alone. Innovation and collaboration usually sit at the table together. We are currently in a time when, at least in American politics, collaboration seems nonexistent.

This notion is what caught my attention in an interview I heard with Steven Johnson who wrote Where Good Ideas Come From.
He writes about how “stacked platforms” of ideas that allow other people to build on them.  This way of ideas coming together from pieces borrowed from another field or another person and remixing feels very much like what has arisen in our digital age.

One example he gives is the 1981 record My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne. It is an innovative album for that time in its use of samples well before the practice became mainstream. Eno was inspired by the varied voices and music and advertising on New York AM radio which was so different from the straightforward BBC radio he grew up with in England. He thought about repurposing all that talk into music.

We call that “decontextualizing” now – in this case a sound or words taken out of context and put in a new place. But this borrowing and remixing also occurs with ideas in culture, science and technology.

Unfortunately, ideas are not always free to connect with each other. Things like copyright and intellectual property law get in the way. We often silo innovators in proprietary labs or departments and discourage the exchange of ideas.

I didn’t know that Ben Franklin had a Club of Honest Whigs that would meet at the London Coffeehouse, when he was in England and they would hang out and exchange ideas.

Johnson describes these as “liquid networks” – not so much for the coffee, but for the fluidity in the conversation. These informal networks work because they are made up of different kinds of people from different backgrounds and experiences. Diversity is not just necessary as a biological concept but as an intellectual one.

The Internet was built on ideas stacked on top of ideas. A whole lot of code and ideas are underneath this post. At its best, when I write online I am connecting, if only virtually, with other writers, artists and thinkers, and connecting literally through hyperlinks to those ideas.

I know there are “Internet cafés,” but what about Internet as a café?