What will it be like...to coordinate a topic about coordination? 

Open networked learning....an anecdote. 

I recently submitted a BID to develop a new MRes (a pre-doctoral degree in the UK) in Clinical Health Leadership. The NHS in England wants to use more of the clinical expertise of nurses, midwives, pharmacists and other health professionals to carry out workplace research, and importantly, to design and lead the research. Universities submitted competitive bids to develop the first stage of this course - a postgraduate certificate. My bid was not accepted. Two other universities were awarded the contract. What matters for this blog is this: the new course will be entirely online, and the qualification will be earned by Open Networked Research. 

Ecologies of Learning

Think about this. A nurse working in Liverpool will collect data from perhaps 10 hospitals, and the NHS computer, collaborating with a clinical trials organisation, under the supervision of a clinician in Newcastle,  to obtain a qualification from a university in Exeter.  An array of people, machines and organisations, generating new knowledge via a distributed network. This scenario recalls the work of George Siemens, and his Connectivist view of learning.  Connectivism interests me for two reasons. One is that it overlaps with ideas of distributed cognition and online ecologies that approach the same conclusions from a different direction. Second, connectivism implies that boundaries between institutions - and perhaps disciplines - are porous. Or, at least, that they should be.  

The problem I can see for porous boundaries and distributed cognition is one of ownership. Who makes decisions? How do we enforce decisions across organisations that have their own arrangements?

Flip the Script

Perhaps this is the wrong question.  Let's go back to David White...is the resource reliable, or usable? if we apply this question to open networked learning, distributed cognition, porous boundaries, then at least three consequences follow. i) I can initiate an inquiry, but other agents hold their own subsets of the data, and can draw their own conclusions from it. ii) I will have no control over the conclusions they draw, or the use they make of the data. iii) The question of usefulness is a purely practical one. If our separate accounts of the data are all published, they might all survive; or alternatively, some will be selected. Let the world sort it out. 

If we insist that distributed cognition must lead to a single, best answer, then we need a decision maker. For some commentators, this decision maker had better be cyberphysical. I have collected my data, it is clear that solution A is better than solution B, C or D, and henceforth a switch will take care of this situation when it arises. Computer says Yes. Computer says No.  In fact, I won't need to collect data in future, because this too will become a matter of automated detection and processing. The switch can change its setting, in response to the updates. 

If we want to avoid a 'future by default' where machines make the decisions, we may have to reconcile ourselves to the first alternative. If we can live with uncertainty, competing visions, fuzzy networks, flickery connections, we can preserve a plural world where we are free to make the wrong decisions....but at least one of them is the right decision, for those who want to use it. 

Entropy

One aspect of educational design is the obsolescence of courses.  Even if the need for updating is identified and acknowledged,  someone has to design the new material that replaces the obsolete; and someone has to agree, at the level of university management, that this revision may take place.

 I call this the problem of course entropy. All courses run down, from the day of their inception. Content, assessment, delivery methods...all of these are quite resistant to refreshment or change. They cease, after a while, to correspond to reality. Paradoxically, by constraining the edge of sp(l)ace, these courses tend to disorder, not order.  This is because the course is a closed system. The apparent simplicity and elegance of its design comes with a cost. 

 Open networked learning could be the solution to the problem of entropy. If we rely less on a published curriculum, and more on explorations across the porous boundaries, across the fuzzy network, course currency would be easier to maintain. The students would tap into the distributed cognition and become part of it themselves.  The students would be IN the discipline not OF the discipline. The alternative is an impoverished curriculum, oriented to the priorities of the last generation. The array of classes, materials and resources,  sustained by institutional customs that deliberately resists change,  resembles a cobweb more than a network. 

The Edge of Splace

I hope we can explore some of these notions in the upcoming topic 3 on Open Networked Learning. Where is the Edge of Splace, how do students communicate across it, and how does distributed cognition lead to changed knowledge, behaviours and people?