On Monday night I had the pleasure of attending the Creative Commons SF Salon on using openness in education. (You can see the video and read about the event here.) While the panelists were all great, the biggest audience reaction of the night was the laughter that erupted when the presentation accidentally showed Wikipedia page on Paul Revere, which has received a great deal of attention lately and provided some great comedic fodder.
The Palin-Revere-Wikipedia story is actually a nice “teachable moment” in thinking about openness in education. As any educator knows, one of the hardest parts of teaching is managing the fine line between freedom and control. Call it the Bueller Principle: you don’t want your students just galavanting around doing whatever they like, but you don’t want to be this guy either. Openness breeds creativity, student-directed learning, and exploration — and also distraction and chaos.
All educational content — be it produced by a publisher or a wiki — must have some control mechanism to ensure its quality. There’s no one “right” mechanism: textbook publishers use a well-established editorial process in which content is reviewed by subject-matter experts as well as copy editors and proofreaders, who work in exchange for money. Wikipedia’s control mechanism relies on the norms of the community and governance rules which are fundamentally enforceable by Wikipedia itself. Both work well for their intended purposes in creating educational resources.
The job gets harder, however, when you start talking about educational services — for example, automatically-graded homework problems like those on Aplia. Providing an educational service implies a transaction between content provider and student: I promise to grade you appropriately, and I’m willing to stand behind that promise. In an offline world, teachers’ services have a well-defined time period: I’m going to teach you in this class, this semester, and after this class is done our relationship is essentially over. By contrast, in an online world of persistent content, there’s no walking away from the service you’re offering. Transactions will continue to occur, and you need to stand behind your work: you have to fix content or technical bugs, grant credit as necessary, provide access to grades for those with the authority to see them, and keep those grades private from those without that authority. You can’t take five minutes, edit a page, and walk away: you’re undertaking a commitment to stand behind the service you provide.
Think about this famous scene from “Dead Poets’ Society” through this lens. It’s all about a “barbaric yawp,” which sounds like openness and self-expression, and to a certain extent that is what the scene’s about — but the physicality of the scene is all about how the teacher tightly controls the creative experience of the student:
Try doing that online! Seriously, try. Because while educational services are much, much harder to create than static content like videos, the transformative potential of weaving together technology, openness, and control is huge. It’s clear that the folks behind Wikipedia are serious about extending their toolset to education authoring tools, which is fantastic. Crowd-sourcing educational services will be a giant benefit to education — but doing it right will be as difficult as it is important.
