Day: November 4, 2022

Innovation requires disruption. Learning requires the deconstruction of established pathways of thinking. Change requires anarchy. These situations imply a certain level of chaos. Yet we seem to have an innate bias toward order in our online spaces and communities.

Perhaps it’s because the wild-west nature of the internet makes most people strive for control over what they perceive as a constant struggle against chaos. The result is that many of our online interactions are over-controlled. We stunt meaningful human change by tacking too much towards order.

Learning and innovation come from the disruption of established routines., Santi Furnari describes places where these kinds of breaks can happen as “interstitial spaces,” which he defines as, “small-scale settings where individuals from different fields interact occasionally and informally around common activities to which they devote limited time (e.g., hobbyist clubs, hangouts, workshops, meet-ups).” (HT Glen McGhee)

It is tricky to get the balance between order and chaos right, however. Too little structure and you risk what Steven Johnson refers to as an aerial network. Too much structure and you risk alienating your audience and turning them into passive spectators, not participants.

Furnari’s interstitial spaces pull the participants out of familiar network interactions and create spaces for “collective experimentation,” such as those exemplified by the Homebrew Computer Club, that can spark changes in practice (aka, innovation and/or learning). 

The content of the new practices is shaped via the collective interactions by which individuals engage with collective experimentation in interstitial spaces. Depending on how these individuals collectively interact and experiment, different types of new activities and ideas can emerge in the first place—that is, from different recombinations of those individuals’ different preexisting practices. In turn, these new activities and ideas provide the “raw materials” from which different types of new hybrid practices can eventually originate. (Furnari, p. 455)

Collective experimentation is particularly difficult to achieve in online spaces. Many, if not most, participants are engaging from within the context of their habitual environments. It is hard to achieve the true immersion necessary for the kind of shared meanings necessary for interstitial spaces.

At ShapingEDU, we have always attempted to create interstitial-type experiences. Our teams routinely create highly interactive online sessions that stand in marked contrast to many other remote events. In the “Four Stages of Zoom Enlightenment,” I used this work to and my experience as a participant in many other remote events to identify four categories of events. These ranged from traditional lecture/presentation (the lowest level) to digital constructivism, a series of live sessions connected by a persistent, tangible work project. 

Truly interstitial online spaces, however, remain elusive. Once you leave an online space (if not before), “real life” quickly takes over. Motivation to repeat the experience is overwhelmed by other responsibilities and follow-on visits to the space do not occur. Furthermore, as sessions become more predictable (an especially difficult problem for classes that meet frequently), there is little sense of the unexpected or anticipation going into the next session. 

Effective in-between spaces generate energies lacking in most of our day-to-day interactions with students and colleagues. This is because they create pockets of interactions insulated from the pressures of our daily networks.

“[I]interstitial spaces are defined both spatially and temporally. Spatially, they are small, in-between spaces – that is, small-scale settings where individuals from different fields meet. Temporally, they are short, in-between temporal spaces – short time intervals between the activities that individuals carry out, on a continuous basis, in their respective fields.” (Furnari, p. 445, emphasis in original)

We struggle to create these kinds of spaces online. Disconnecting people from the world around them (like my son does when he’s gaming) has long been a criticism of the online experience. However, this rarely extends to “professional” interactions. I know that many of my students, left unattended, would run my class as background noise and get on with their lives.

A common reaction is to over-structure the online event. Injecting order is a natural reaction to a perceived lack of control. One leader of the Homebrew Computer Club, Gordon French, tried this. It was not terribly successful:

Lee Felsenstein would later recall. “[Gordon French] would try to push the discussion to where he wanted it to go. He wanted it to be an educational event, holding lectures, teaching people about certain things, especially stuff he was expert on. He was very upset if the discussion strayed from people literally teaching other people in a schoolish sense. He would jump into whatever people were saying and get involved in the content, injecting his opinions and telling them ‘There’s an important point that shouldn’t be missed, and I know more about this kind of stuff.’” After the first part of the meeting, in which people would introduce themselves and say what they were working on, Gordon would stand up in front of the room and give what amounted to a tutorial, explaining the way the machine uses the code you feed into it, and informing the restless members how learning good coding habits will save you headaches in the future… and sooner or later people would get so impatient they’d slip out of the meetings and start exchanging information in the hall. (Steven Levy, Hackers, p. 179, O’Reilly Media. Kindle Edition.)

There is a spectrum between order and chaos. From the facilitator standpoint, tending toward order is easier to execute because you can control all the variables. This is also why it is so easy to gravitate toward a lecture-based approach to teaching. It also represents the lowest level of community engagement. 

If we isolate and dehumanize our audiences, our efforts are unlikely to stimulate creative growth in distributed communities of practice. In the artificial environments that we create online, and all-too-often in-person as well, it is easy to overlook the humanity of our participants.

Feeling our way toward the right balance is difficult, however. Open-ended discussions suffer from a lack of time boundaries. There is no pressure to bring the conversation to a close and so resolutions are rare. Mission creep is common. Bounded events risk stifling ideas because of a lack of time.

Perhaps the problem is that we are trying to over-control even this aspect of our interactions with one another. Furnaripoints out that connections between events are essential for establishing shared practices.

“[T]o constitute new practices, the new activities emerging in interstitial spaces need to be repeated over time, allowing new ideas to ‘stick’ – to be shared among the people interacting in those spaces, thereby being conducive to the formation of shared meanings around these new activities and ideas.” (p. 450) 

Repetition is more important than structure. It is repeated practices that form the catalyst for turning interactions into collective experimentation. Without them, even the most fruitful sessions are going to be largely wasted. Alternating periods of chaotic energy and thoughtful reflection should become repeated practice. 

One strategy for creating interstitial moments might be to establish periodic meetings where people bring their pedagogical innovations to the table and try to apply their techniques to the rest of the group. Another might be an open-ended book/article club where participants can suggest their own reading for group discussion and reflection (stay tuned on that one). I took part in such a group with four friends/colleagues several years ago. It resulted in many fruitful conversations and a lot of creative growth on my part.

Learners of all types benefit from a little chaos in their lives. It’s scary, but if applied in a safe space, discomfort can be a catalyst for exploration. We may not invent the next personal computer, but perhaps we can cut through some of the rigid order that characterizes so many interactions, especially online, these days.

It’s the beginning of the semester and I’m once again trying to bridge two incompatible systems. My students are used to closed-loop systems of education. They have had years of training in the rhythm of cram and exam (or some variation thereof). The “best” of them have mastered this pattern and start the semester trying to figure out my version of it. All of them see everything I/we do through this lens. The disconnect occurs when my class design doesn’t conform to their expectations.

The natural human reaction is to navigate the “maze” – and it is a maze – that I have set up with the minimum amount of effort necessary to get through it. Our students struggle to find meaning in the systems of education that have acculturated their habits of schooling. It is a rare student capable of looking beyond these structures. We program them not to.

One of my favorite scenes from Monty Python’s Life of Brian is the one where he tells the crowd “You’re all different!” and one guy says, “I’m not.” I feel like this a lot as a teacher. I try to convince my students that they need to engage in open-ended exploration, but they only want to know what I want them to do.

When I try to make the class expectations about them instead of me, they find this profoundly disorienting. My “final” is a web portfolio which they own. It’s a website on a server that they control. They’re creating a tangible artifact based on their own interests that they can use to show their communication and analysis skills to future classes or employers. They can take this assignment as far as they want. It’s an open loop.

Despite this, they never push the boundaries of what’s possible. Their focus is squarely on what is necessary. Necessary is always a closed loop.

Professional life today is not a set of closed loops. It is a set of problems, both large and small, that we must navigate. There are few instruction manuals on how to close these loops. The best we can hope to give our students are sets of skills that will prepare them for the unexpected.

One of the key failures of our educational system is that we structured it around routinized patterns that prepare our students for a world that doesn’t exist. Some students check out from clearly pointless routines. Others accept them and adapt their own patterns to match. Neither approach can solve complex problems. Getting through the routine motivates most of my students, not seeing what they can individually or collectively accomplish.

Perhaps most perniciously, they look upon collective effort with deep suspicion because the routine of education drives people toward zero-sum thinking. Whether you get through the system has little to do with whether I do.

This semester, and not for the first time, I had a student react strongly to the merest suggestion of graded group work. That’s because, inevitably, some percentage of the group will focus on the lowest common denominator necessary to “survive” the experience. The more engaged/savvy students don’t want to harness their wagons to drag those students along. They view peer learning as a trap.

Isaac Asimov’s “Profession” essentially parodies how far this kind of system can go. In his story, most “students” (they are programmed with knowledge instead of working for it) are directed, based on brain scans, to their “ideal” professions. They simply download the knowledge to carry out that profession into their receptive brains.

George Platen’s brain scans don’t conform to any pattern. The system relegates him to a “House for the Feebleminded” and he finds himself overcome by the shame of not being “allowed” to conform to the system.

Rereading this story just as the semester began really brought home to me the extent to which we mirror Asimov’s dystopian vision of education. I designed my class, within the constraints of the larger system, for the George Platens of the world. The rest of the system creates programmed individuals.

Unlike Asimov, I don’t believe that Platen is an exceptional case. I think everyone has, to a greater or lesser extent, a nonconformist impulse that results in creativity across a broad spectrum of activity. It’s just been buried by our closed loop education systems that emphasize conformity to process over creative, individualized approaches to learning.

These systems are no longer sustainable. Unbridled capitalism based on scarce resources has led to resource depletion, climate change and a general disregard for the needs of individuals. Many of the systems we are used to are not sustainable in this environment. Most of them were never equitable and depended on the exploitation of those less fortunate for their success.

In theory, learning represents one of the few open loops that exists in this paradigm. Open loops represent our best hope for navigating the thicket of challenges confronting our world. Over 75 years ago, Vannevar Bush recognized that closed-loop systems could neither manage the knowledge of the world nor the challenges that science and technology were creating. Following in Bush’s footsteps, Douglas Engelbart spent decades trying to apply technology to systematize open loop thinking, which he called “Collective IQ.”

Engelbart recognized that the fusion of technology with human collaboration was a means to bring humans to the level where they might confront the increasingly complex issues unleashed by the technology itself.

Consider a group’s Collective IQ to represent its capability for dealing with complex, urgent problems – to perceive and understand them adequately, to engage the stakeholders, to unearth the best candidate solutions, to assess resources and operational capabilities and select appropriate solutions and commitments, to be effective in organizing and executing the selected approach, to monitor the progress, to be able to adjust rapidly and appropriately to unforeseen complications, and so on.

He argues that we grow Collective IQ by exploring the “anticipatable” horizon leveraging both technology and our human capacity for imagination. This is something I want my students to do, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Engelbart augmentation horizon

Adapted from Engelbart

However, like Engelbart, I encounter resistance on a wide range of fronts, from institutions that are based on getting students through closed-loop systems of instruction to students who find the opened-ended nature of exploration disorientating.

These are issues that are difficult to resolve at the instructional level. The larger systemic context needs to support this kind of learning. This is a real challenge, as these systems are driven by larger societal factors, such as the “accountability movement,” that create perverse impulses toward closed loops.

If we hope to engage our societies in the project of Collective IQ to solve our urgent and unraveling challenges, we need to start with a realization of these interconnections and create systems of open loop learning. Our students are all different, even if they don’t want to be.

We like to think that learning takes place in a physical location. We call those places schools or colleges or universities. Often, we call those places classrooms. This is an incomplete picture. Those words describe places that can facilitate learning, but ultimately, all learning takes place in the mind.

We externalize learning because we have been trained to do so by more than a century of industrialized education. Digital thinking should liberate us from these logistical shackles, but that hasn’t happened yet. This disconnect is not a new thing. As early as the 1970s, Ivan Illich recognized how we commonly confuse learning with the physical manifestation of school when he wrote:

The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value.

If we disconnect learning from schooling, we can apply a much more flexible mindset to our design processes. This could have profound implications for how we design our pedagogy, programs of instruction, and technologies. These technologies include all the virtual and physical spaces that we can use to facilitate learning, not just the “gadgets” that may populate them. The key is to blend spaces and technologies into a continuum of tools that we can apply to any course or any individual who needs help to learn.

Our conception of “campuses” comes from the industrial notion of the factory. Factories don’t empower humans. They make us widgets in a machine. If you want more widgets, you build bigger factories.

Technologies often go through a period where they get bigger to maximize inefficient sources of energy and our ability to turn that energy to their purpose. In early aircraft, it was common to put more and more engines on a plane to generate more lift. Then we improved the engines and the ratio of engines to lift shrunk. The same is true for our educational technologies. Consider the cost and complexity of early Polycom systems and compare them to what you need to have a conversation in Zoom or FaceTime.

But this is also true on a systemic level. As we have attempted to scale education to a wider and wider portion of the population, the schools have grown to accommodate physical bodies in physical classrooms. It is high time we applied more efficient engines to our goals of connecting learners with knowledge and skills.

Remote teaching during the pandemic showed efficiencies are possible. Teaching and learning can happen wherever the student is. There is no iron rule that says the students must congregate in a specific physical location in order to hear the voice of the teacher.

Forcing students to gather excludes large parts of the population who cannot commit to being in the same place at the same time because of work or family obligations. It aggregates learning away from the individual, leading to less diversity through a reduction in individualized learning. These realities alone should lead us to question the current strategies for scaling education.

My experience as a remote teacher during the pandemic showed me the importance of community and collective engagement with the material that we were trying to learn. My students missed being able to congregate in person. What was missing, however, was not the classroom. It was the “hallway time” of informal spaces. We could move the classroom online fairly easily. Community time, however, was much more difficult to replicate. This realization led me to revisit the work I had done on informal learning for a local community college.

Immediately before the pandemic struck, I consulted on a new campus for Houston Community College. The brief for this campus was to maximize enrollment on a minimal footprint. Using classic measures of X number of student seats into Y number of classrooms that can be scheduled for Z number of hours did not work. This calculation showed that the desired enrollment was 50% higher than the space would accommodate, at least according to traditional measures.

Our approach to the resulting design was not to cram in more classrooms. Instead, we tacked in the opposite direction in order to maximize informal and support areas. This created a hybrid/blended environment where students taking online classes would find a place for collaboration and support. We would then effectively move much of the enrollment online but still create a hub for learning where learners could come together to form communities of practice.

This work led to many offshoots, starting with the STAC model and culminating in the Hybrid+ concept that I outlined in my 2020 book, Learn at Your Own Risk. The root of these ideas is that students need to be motivated and supported to engage in effective learning. This should form the underlying goal of any campus. Campuses with this design philosophy also support teachers that are trying to create individualized pedagogy.

That means that we should teach those things that require persistence, repetition, and convenience online. The campus would support everything from study groups to teacher-led small work groups to events that host outside experts. It would form a critical interface between students and the knowledge that they are seeking.

The other implication of this approach is that we need to rethink the nature of our courses. We should start by removing artificial distinctions between online and in person instruction. There is every reason to expect most courses to blend all modalities. The key distinction should be whether learning is expected to be synchronous or asynchronous, not whether it’s done online or in a physical space. All courses encompass both already. However, we don’t make efficient use of online resources to maximize the impact of the limited amount of synchronous time students and teachers have together.

Courses are tools used to contain discrete bits of knowledge. We build walls around them. This is another legacy of the specialization of undergraduate learning stemming from the factory model. The logistics of classrooms mean they are a scarce resource and that drives enrollment calculations and scheduling considerations. If digital learning means anyone can seamlessly teach or contribute to learning in a course, what’s the point of segregation?

With a fluid course model, any specialist can come into the course seamlessly and enhance the experience of the students, deepening their learning. Creating this level of fluidity will require systemic rethinking of how we organize our spaces, time, and structures of learning. We can build to optimize resources in all three areas. We can already adapt existing technologies and spaces to experiment with how this might work. For example, I already have a librarian embedded in my classes using nothing more than the affordances of my Learning Management System shell.

The learning space of the future is the mind. The technology spaces we build around that should reflect the realities of how people learn more than the logistics of how we educate them. Physical spaces, like the new Katy campus, which opened in May 2022, should form part of a much larger suite of tools, technologies, and people that will support learning in all its forms. This will also give us new opportunities to humanize, individualize, and diversify the education journeys for all.

There are certain books that constantly influence how I design systems for those I teach, advise, and facilitate. As I looked at the universe of books on that make up this list, patterns emerged. The list itself told a story. It was not an unexpected story, but I must admit that it surprised me at how suddenly it came into logical focus. These books orbit around the pole of postmodernist constructivism.

I discussed how constructivism has influenced my thinking in another blog, but it bears mentioning here that I think all technologists need to approach technological change with a constructivist mentality. As technologists, we build new worlds. Postmodernism deconstructs many of the paradigms of the old industrial world that we take for granted. Stripping bare the assumptions of our industrial culture is essential if we want to design authentically digital systems.

When I was studying postmodernist theory in graduate school, it was often attacked as rejecting the rationalism upon which humans built the modern world. Like many absolutist critiques, this is only partially true. Constructivist postmodernism accepts the processes of rationalism. However, it explores the possibility that our supposedly neutral analysis of the natural or social worlds is not really neutral after all. It challenges us to examine the social and historical factors in these biases instead of accepting human-constructed systems as they are present to us.

We should question the logic of every system. The overwhelming majority of systems we take for granted today, from government to business to education, were constructed using rationalist models. These systems now find themselves challenged by the fluid and fast-moving nature of technological change. The first signs of this come as “traditional” media being overwhelmed by “social” media, but other systems are increasingly coming under scrutiny.

What is missing from this all-too-familiar conversation is the idea that we can intervene in these changes to push humans to the fore. If we refuse to criticize inhuman legacy systems, we will continue our servitude to the machines. But we also have a responsibility to go beyond criticism and build new and better alternatives that bring people together instead of driving them apart.

As we build technology systems, we inevitably bump up against systems that reject critical questioning (see the “Understanding Systems” books on the list and my own Discovering Digital Humanity). Perceiving these systemic realities is essential for designing technologies that will not be rejected as being too threatening, but still reform practice to be more inclusive, diverse, and human. Applying constructivist thinking is an essential tool in achieving these goals.

As I neared the end of this project, I recognized that a Venn Diagram would provide a useful tool for visualizing how these topic areas overlapped and that the one area where they all overlapped is in the constructivist literature. The book that emerged at the center of it all was The Foucault Reader. While this is not the only constructivist text out there, it is one of the more approachable ones and summarizes many of the key tenets of the philosophy.

Constructivist thinking can seem deeply threatening because it seeks to question everything. As humans, we instinctively grasp at patterns of familiarity. They give us the illusion of control over our environments.

We construct systems for efficiency but also to protect ourselves from the unexpected. As a result, we often construct these systems reactively. They always incorporate human fears and cultural biases.

We find ourselves in a period of immense technological flux. This reality gives technologists immense power because we are the people constructing new systems from scratch. The job of the technologist is to support digital humanity through mindful design. Building systems of technology requires that we design them to augment the human experience. I chose the books on the list because they give the reader a primer on how to design technology, navigate systems, and construct networks of humans.

I organized the seven areas on the book list in such a way as to take the technologist on a journey from the concrete to the abstract. In the inner orbit, we start with technology design, progress to systems design, and then look at how systems push back against change (and strategies for working through that resistance).

The outer orbit contains books that teach us where we can use technology to create environments for human augmentation. First, we look at how we construct networks of knowledge. Second, we look at different venues of storytelling that the digital world opens up for us (word processing, visual tools, and gaming). Finally, we look at how we can design and adapt systems to achieve specific human tasks, from operating carrier battle groups to teaching and learning.

The last section returns to the center to look at the wellspring of constructivist thinking. If you progress through these areas of human-centered technology design, you can see Foucault with fresh eyes. In the coming months, I am considering reversing this journey using articles instead of entire books to show how you can use the end as the beginning as easily as you can use it as the end.

All the sections revolve in an orbit of powerful attraction around this basic idea that we construct how we see – either physically, virtually, or in our imaginations. If we understand this, we can see pathways to navigate to a mindfully designed future where the human, not technology or organizational/cultural constructions, stands firmly in the center. The alternative is that we can all become slaves in various forms of technological and systemic dystopias.

Given a choice, I always choose the humanist approach, but it often takes a lot of reflection to find that. The collective lesson in these books is that, as constructors, we can build systems that revolve around ourselves and are profoundly human. Collectively, they point us down the pathway to discovering digital humanity.