Openness

Should it all be Miscellaneous?

/ Cole Camplese / 36 Comments

I know from the start that much of what I am working through will agitate a great number of the people around campus and the world that I consider colleagues. I apologize in advance, but this is territory I want to explore with others.

Today I attended the Penn State Web Conference and left asking new questions about how the information of the academy should be organized … even in that statement I am making the assumption that we should be organizing it. When I step back, I have to ask myself a simple question — what the hell am I asking? Of course we need to organize it — without our attempt to put content into an organized structure we aren’t climbing the curve to information and are certainly stopping short of knowledge … but, to tell you the truth I am now questioning that notion specifically. I am also rethinking the notion of the systems we are asking users to adopt — content management systems. Even the naming of it has become very frustrating to me … the idea that we need to manage content may not be the right approach at all.

I am reading David Weinberger’s new book, Everything is Miscellaneous and am taking from it the idea that information really wants to be free from the structure we attempt to pack it into — as if information is like the silverware we obsessively place into the drawer separated by the little dividing lines. His observation is that digital world shouldn’t be organized in such rigid first or second order structures — that instead it should be allowed to exist as complete thoughts and rearranged and explored based on the users’ needs or the context seekers are approaching it for. From his book:

We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory. We can do it ourselves and, more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we have to go to them. The miscellaneous order is not transforming only business. It is changing how we think the world itself is organized and — perhaps more important — who we think has the authority to tell us so.

So what. Well, what I am continuing to think about is the institutional knowledge issue I’ve been exploring over the course of the last few weeks. The Web Conference, while very solid, seems to be dwelling on two things — the big problem with managing the web at a large University and the use of content management to fix it. I am starting to think we are all wrong on both counts. I’ll try to make sense of that.

The idea that we can follow a book filled with instructions on how to do information architecture, web design, usability, and so forth may be crazy. The problems are too large to be solved by following a recipe that seems to work for corporate sites that have a focus on selling something — sure you can argue we are selling something and that is true. The problem I see is that we have stakeholder groups that insist on being included, largely can’t effectively participate, and really don’t have the space in their worlds to worry about the problem. Think about the pressures that compete with our primary need (in my mind that is recruiting new students) within the context of a University website — instantly I think about faculty pages, research centers, information for existing students, knowledge bases, externally facing Intranet like pages, class webpages, and so on (and on and on …). Let me just say it, those books don’t exist. I haven’t come across the process for managing that process. The system is too complex to look at it and arrive at an answer that makes them all happy.

The second thing I am concerned about is the almost fanatical need to push a tool as a solution. I am all for content management systems (hell I use them every day), but I am afraid that we will sell them as the solution and that they will lead to unfulfilled promises. The CMS will be part of the answer, but why have we lost our ability to look at the overall system? Not a CMS system, I am talking about taking a systemic view on the issue.

I don’t have the answer, but I spent some time talking to a few people I find very smart and suggested we take a step back and look more closely at what has made Wikipedia successful … I am thinking specifically about the governance models around what does and doesn’t see the light of day. What if we did an exercise that asks a subset of our dozens upon dozens of stakeholders to strip away all the noise around the Institutional webspace and focus only on the handful of critical concepts and directed intense, top down energy on that? Below this threshold, let go of control. Completely. Give the users the right and ability to write what needs to be written — let them easily collaborate, share, edit, tag, and create the information that makes sense. Don’t make them worry about hierarchy and navigation. Let University Relations work with the right people to manage say 100 pages within the Institution’s webspace and then let everyone else manage everything else. Make the stuff we really need to share so obvious that it just works and then just let search lead people to the rest. No idea if it would work, but after listening to and interacting with a couple hundred web professionals today, the current system isn’t cutting it.

My parting thought is if we are actually doing what I suggest, but in a massively inefficient way — everyone chooses their tools, establishes their own processes, and builds their own site maps. How does one make the leap from a massively decentralized process to a massively coordinated decentralized collaborative approach? Wow, I have no idea if any of that made any sense. I need reaction and feedback. If you made it this far, I’ll buy the beer to talk this over.

Open Design Questions without Answers

/ Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

I am beginning to think that “May is Think Open Month” for me … obviously thinking about openness is something that has been in the middle of my head for the last several weeks. The trip to the Berkman@10 event pushed me very hard to evaluate the things I feel are important to me as I do my work — as an administrator, teacher, and person. I have be reevaluating many of the descions I’ve made over the last few years in my work and I think for the most part I’ve been consistent in my push for openness … I’m not always able to be moving in that direction, but for the most part I have spent the last few years thinking very critically about the interplay between identity, community, and deisgn as it realtes to openness. The events of the last month have only served to push me further down the path to look even more critically at how I can impact change at my Institution and beyond to embrace a collective voice as it relates to moving to a more open perspective.

I’m not thinking about open courseware, open (unfiltered) ranting, or other more disruptive concepts … no, I am thinking more about how openness should be built into the design process. Not really instructional design per say, but design in general … in my mind learning design is looking at the notion of building learning opportunities in a more broad sense than more strict instructional systems design. I am interested in what happens when we (designers) give up a majority of the control and let our communities come in and particpate in a more holistic sense. Would chaos emerge if we didn’t control the learning design process, just enabled it through new governance models (unfortunate term as it feels very controlling), new methodologies for encouraging open participation, and open access to tools? I am thinking seriously about what it would look like to convince a department that we should embark on a new approach to knowledge capture … a wikipedia approach that places the emphasis on the community to create the reification of knowledge as they see fit. What would that look like?

I am seriously considering proposing to teach a new course this Fall (I know it sounds crazy) with a focus on exploring open design … maybe doing it in the context of creating discipline specific knowledge by the community. I don’t know what College this works in, but clearly the College of Education or the College of Information Sciences and Technology would be prime targets for this. This is not fully baked (as I thought of it about an hour ago as I mowed the lawn), but my goal would be to turn over the design of the articulation of knowledge to the community. Let the students work to determine what we should capture and how to do it — furthermore, let them explore how to encourage a larger community involvement in that task as well. I see a wiki sitting in the middle with a discipline specific outline in it … each major item in the outline is an article stub that teams of students would work to complete. I wonder if they could create articles that could stand up to the scrutiny of a group of faculty reviewers? I wonder if the illustration of a project like this would tip the scales towards a more bottom up curricular knowledge creation perspective? I wonder if it would produce any interesting outcomes?

Lots of questions, but as with most new half-baked concepts questions often are the only things to guide us. I have no idea if any of this would work, but after reading about some great examples of faculty pushing students to craft complete knowledge destined for wikipedia, I am fairly certain the mechanics could work. So at the end of the day I am interested in seeing if a few of my questions could be answered:

  • Can you ask a loosely joined group to work together in a distributed way to construct a concrete example of expressed discipline specific material?
  • Would the work of a small class encourage participation from outside the class?
  • Could the resulting articles be valuable enough that they could form the basis for some other curricular activities? In other words, would they hold up to the standard set forth by more traditional eLearning content creation approaches?
  • Would Colleges or Departments invest the time of the expertise at the top (faculty) to form some sort of domain specific governance (oversight) committee to help ensure quality content from the community?
  • Would studnets participating in a course like this gain enough through the creation of small pieces of content? In other words, the course would have to be about open design, not a specific curricular goal.

With my las bullet I think I captured what I really want — I want to spend 15 weeks with a small group of smart students investigating what open design means and how we could all learn to apply what we learn to novel challenges. Should I do it? Who wants to help?

Open Thinking

/ Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

I am still reeling from my Berkman@10 experience last week … I have told a handful of people that the gathering was perhaps the most important thing I have done professionally in the ten years I have been in higher education. No kidding … there were moments that I was able to discover great clarity in some of my thinking — mostly followed by moments of great confusion. The things that resonated most for me centered on what was the primary theme of the event — openness. At the event the notion of openness took many forms — media, learning, politics, and access come to mind as the most critically discussed. I went in with a strong sense of how this would be discussed because of my recent opportunities to spend time with Lessig, but I didn’t expect my thinking to be impacted as much as it has by the event.

One of the more exciting opportunities the event afforded was having dinner with David Weinberger on the middle night of the event. I love David’s work (particularly the Cluetrain Manifesto) and was very eager to hear him in person. His work in the late 90s pushed me to embrace the notion of the conversation as the core tenant of the Internet and getting to spend time with him did not disappoint! At our dinner table was an executive from British Telecom, a young man working to break down information barriers in Cuba, an attorney and lobbyist who wrote some of the original briefs on network neutrality, a creative director from Public Radio International, and others. The discussion carried real depth for nearly two hours and I found that I was able to participate at an acceptable level, even choosing to move topics around and lead some of the discussions. It was outstanding. What I took from the dinner had everything to do with open access to knowledge and content via our networks. We take for granted just how open our networks are for producing and accessing information — in general we have clear access (without content filters) to anything available. This just isn’t the case on a global basis. That guy from Cuba I mentioned? He and his group use USB memory sticks to distribute content because their isn’t open access in Cuba. His stories floored me. After dinner I bought Weinberger’s new book, Everything is Miscellaneous. So far it is pushing me to think even harder about what I was exposed to last week. I recommend it.

Now, open content … I spent time listening to Jimmy Wales (founder of wikipedia) and while he can come off as arrogant and self-righteous (to some), there are some very powerful ideas in the things he says and stands for. I listened very closely to his notion of an open environment for creating knowledge and was particularly interested in the governance models supporting it all. It got me thinking about our own challenges in higher education as they relate to content creation and management for learning. Where is the wikipedia of course content? I am not really thinking about open courseware per say, what I am thinking about is how to create a discipline specific content space that could support the creation of articles by faculty for teaching and learning. Could a College or department work at the committee level to create the outline of the critical concepts within a given space and ask its faculty and students (and perhaps alumni) to create the wiki articles that satisfies these concepts? I think the answer is yes and would like to talk to some people about exploring this through practice.

The last thing I will mention here is an amazing quote by Jonathan Zittrain … “The Internet has no main menu.” If you really think about the web and what has won — open access via the browser over the closed content provider client applications (AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy) you see this is true. Information wants to be free and when the network is open it allows contribution. Our models for collecting institutional content is going to keep us relegated to the successes (and ultimately the failures) of an AOL model. We live in times where the open Internet beat the closed content environment … why not create that structure inside the academy.

Ok, let me hear it!

Our Learning Design Non-Conference

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

As the TLT Symposium approaches I am struck again and again at how much I enjoy working in the PSU Learning Design community … this community is made up of faculty in all sorts of disciplines, staff across our campuses who think about teaching and learning with technology, and students who are engaged in discovering new territory. It is really active and alive! My Twitter stream tells me that is true.

With that in mind, I am thinking about how we get as many of these people together to keep pushing our conversation forward. One thing I know we should have done a long time ago is some sort of an unconference model where we can come together, pick some topics, and share thoughts related to them. So, the other night I put together a page at my wiki asking for help in designing the First Annual Learning Design Non-Conference. Come on in and help us figure it out … the whole thing feels like the right thing to do. If there are people outside the area who would want to join the fun, help us think about how we could extend it to others.

Movable Type as an Open Content Toolset

/ Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

I have been thinking more and more about the opportunities we have at our fingertips now that we have an enterprise blogging toolset in place here at the University. I’ve watched my online colleagues discussing open courseware and blog tools for about a week now and am ready to chime in with my own thoughts. I am impressed with the progress and ah-ha moments that have gone on around the edu-blog web for the better part of a week, although I am slightly surprised in that many of these same people are the ones who have been banging the “blog is more than a blog” drum for quite some time. I spent the better part of a year working that angle in hopes of getting our own decision makers to buy into an enterprise blog tool — “no, its a personal content management system …” So as I watched D’Arcy, Brian, Jim, and David show off the work they’ve done and the excellent thinking they are sharing I was a little confused by the excitement.

But then it hit me. The glorious piece to this is not the software, it is the philosophical underpinnings it is supporting. Openness. Open content that can be easily created, managed, searched, and then shared out (using a number of interesting methods) to other platforms so it can be customized and treated the way people want to treat content — ironically, as their own. What I mean is that we’ve all talked about online repositories for the last 10 or so years, what I see as the difference here is that I can find good open content, grab it, move it into a drop dead simple environment (like wordpress.com), and manipulate it and make it more like the environment I want it to be. We always wanted that but we (at least) couldn’t make it happen. Maybe we can now.

So, we have Movable Type as our enterprise blogging tool here at PSU. That means that anyone with an access account and webspace can log in and create a blog. A couple of clicks, some typing, and you are publishing. To me it spells a platform to support all sorts of learning content design and development. What if for a minute we envisioned a second install of MT that is built to be specifically for course design and development? A design team (including faculty) could build in this space using all the collaborative tools to do so, take advantage of tags, categories, and other meta-like data to help keep things straight, and create killer learning objects. This isn’t really new thinking. But what if all these things were just open and waiting to be exported (in MT format) and imported (in MT format) directly into our enterprise blog tool by a single faculty member who was interested in taking what was available and adding the parts they wanted the most — their own personal contexts to bring it to life.

A project like this would allow us to explore some things at an Institutional level and actually answer some questions … a few things that come to mind include:

  • Platforms: The blog environment is the perfect kind of place to hang all sorts of opportunities off … I am thinking about podcasts, streaming media, google maps, links to ANGEL, and all sorts of other small pieces.
  • Best Practices: What does it mean to use an environment like MT to produce learning content or objects … could we build a roadmap for others to follow?
  • OER Standards: We need to establish all sorts of baseline constructs if we are going to move into a more OER space … what is the granularity of content, what kinds of tags should be used, how do we manage assets, and all the other things we worry about with learning object design.
  • OER Policies: Even more critical to the long term vision is how do we position ourselves (and our content) for use and reuse? I know there is at least one College on campus already playing in the OER space, but what does it sound like as an Institutional conversation?
  • Attitudes: How will our stakeholders react and what do people really think about sharing?
  • Usability: Does this type of environment lend itself to use, and maybe more importantly is it the right kind of space to use in the first place?

It isn’t fully baked and I know there are holes in it, but I am willing to put a group of people together to aggressively explore it … what should we be thinking about — and at the end of the day, why shouldn’t we do it? I know this post is not articulate enough to really illustrate the vision, but it is my feeble attempt to get some input and get a conversation started around the concept. Anyone care to share some thoughts or participate in a larger discussion?