Geoff Cain at his blog criticizes my article on MOOCs in the Boston Review. Cain complains that I am not an expert on the educational theory surrounding.MOOCs. This is true. MOOCs only became a big deal in education within the last couple year and only came to my attention a few months ago. My area of specialization is not theory of education. So I am catching up quickly. There is so little time, however, and one has to speak quickly since the threat to higher education is immediate. Some MOOC promoters are arguing for reduction of faculty by fifty per cent in the next five to ten years. So we only have that much time before higher education as we know it is over.
Cain notes that I do not distinguish between different types of MOOCs. Yet I make important distinctions between types of MOOCs in the opening paragraph of my article. The MOOCs I am concerned about are not the ones that are there primarily for autodidacts and are not for credit. I am concerned about MOOCs that are being used to replace teachers in higher education. This is the real point of MOOCs. This is how MOOCs will save money. Coursera and the other companies would not exist if there was not money to be made somewhere in all of this.
Cain writes, "I hate to tell Leddy this, but literacies are changing. I do a lot of
writing, but my work depends more on my ability to collaborate with
others and the creation of intelligent networks than my ability to write
a ten page paper."
This kind of comment reminds me of when people would say in the 1960s that watching TV gave one a new kind of literacy. Sure, one could say this in a way. But even though someone could learn a lot by watching TV, literacy was still literacy, i.e. a matter of being able to read and write. Watching TV doesn't help you much with either.
Cain tells us that he does a lot of writing, and I do not doubt that Cain himself is literate. I suspect that his literacy came from actually taking classes from live teachers in a university. Still, even if he is an autodidact himself and learned how to write from reading the writings of others, those others probably learned how to read and write in a formal educational context. Even autodidacts depend on the educational institutions they avoid.
What I want to ask, however, is whether Cain's literacy changed because he uses a computer to write and post? I doubt it. More puzzling is his comment about his "ability to collaborate with others." There is a long tradition of co-writing articles, books and so forth. There is no change in literacy between writing an article by oneself and writing it with someone else. The philosophy department at SJSU co-wrote out letter criticizing Sandel. Our literacy did not change because of this.
Cain also wants to contrast collaborative work with the ability to write a ten page paper. I wonder why the length of the paper is so important to him. My students are required to write pieces of various lengths, from under one page to as long as ten pages. Graduate students are expected to write even longer pieces. Writing at greater length requires greater organizational skill and deeper understanding of a subject matter. (Part of the attack on the ten page paper may belong to some belief that in the age of tweets, the more complex literacy needed to write about something in depth is no longer needed.) In any case, whatever literacy is required to write a good ten page paper or a good one page paper is the same as whatever literacy is required to write something collaborative.
I suspect all of this talk about "changing literacies" is just a excuse for rejecting the very notion of literacy. Perhaps Cain doesn't think that it is important any more to learn how to read and write critically and creatively. That would be too bad, since if the view was widely held we could well be said to be entering into a new dark ages.
So is "creation of intelligent networks" supposed to replace reading and writing? Well, whatever "creation of intelligent networks" is, it is not a matter of literacy any more than creation of a good pot is. Creating good pots is a wonderful skill....but it would be a great mistake to claim that any skill is a "literacy." (I wonder whether I am part of Cain's "intelligent network" or does an intelligent network only consist of people who agree with each other?)
Yes! You are in my "intelligent network" your blog is in my RSS reader, Feedly. I believe that it is as important to subscribe to a wide variety of viewpoints.
ReplyDeleteThe thing I really object to is educators who have not taken the time to adequately research MOOCs who are writing sweeping generalizations based on their own limited experience (most often none). MOOCs have not just been around for a couple of years - I took one in 2008. Your article in BR says "The key problem is not even MOOCs so much as it is with the reduction of knowledge to that which can be tested by a multiple-choice exam or similar methods." I have taken three MOOCs and never once took a multiple choice exam. We wrote a lot, had lots of group discussions, and participated in webinars with the teachers and facilitators. This would be what is described as a cMOOC, a “Connectivist MOOC” and the watch the video, take a test model is the xMOOC.
I don’t get upset when someone cries “they are going to cut teaching jobs” because I don’t think the primary purpose of a college is to be an employment agency for teachers. None of the MOOCs that I participated in cut any teaching jobs. There were only a few teachers in the world who could have taught it (Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008). The point of the MOOC wasn’t to eliminate teaching jobs, but to open education up to as many people as possible by eliminating the barriers of geography and cost. I really question the motives of those who are threatened by this. I believe that educating as many people as possible is a good thing.
My beef with the 10 page paper is that it is often used in English classes and in other disciplines as a catch-all assessment. Writing papers can become so formulaic that students can write them in their sleep and teachers can grade them the same way. I am just asking that we look at the outcomes of the class and look at what the students will actually be doing in the workplace or their life, and how they will be communicating and incorporate that into assessment. I don’t think that the essay is necessarily the best way to evaluate what students know or to measure that they know how use what they have learned. And yes, I do believe in critical thinking, reading and writing, and yes, literacies. What literacy used to mean is that you mastered the technology of reading and writing to such a level that you could spell your own name; surely different technologies require different literacies. Literacy in the historic sense was and is a skill. We measure those skills in schools and refer to them with names like “Computer Literacy,” “Financial Literacy” etc. If you have more effective language to use in place of that, I would be happy to use it. Effective collaboration is a skill.