WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.960 align:middle line:90% [SQUEAKING] 00:00:01.960 --> 00:00:03.430 align:middle line:90% [RUSTLING] 00:00:03.430 --> 00:00:04.900 align:middle line:90% [CLICKING] 00:00:04.900 --> 00:00:12.003 align:middle line:90% 00:00:12.003 --> 00:00:13.670 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: Today, we're going to talk 00:00:13.670 --> 00:00:16.770 align:middle line:84% about peer-guided learning at scale. 00:00:16.770 --> 00:00:18.637 align:middle line:84% The thing I asked you to do for today 00:00:18.637 --> 00:00:20.720 align:middle line:84% was to write a little bit in your learning journal 00:00:20.720 --> 00:00:23.420 align:middle line:84% about one of your hobbies that you use 00:00:23.420 --> 00:00:26.060 align:middle line:90% online resources to learn from. 00:00:26.060 --> 00:00:29.510 align:middle line:84% So just get in groups of three and spend the first few minutes 00:00:29.510 --> 00:00:33.020 align:middle line:84% talking to each other about what kinds of hobbies you have 00:00:33.020 --> 00:00:35.725 align:middle line:84% and what kind of online learning you do in those hobbies. 00:00:35.725 --> 00:00:36.600 align:middle line:90% Does that make sense? 00:00:36.600 --> 00:00:37.010 align:middle line:90% Ready? 00:00:37.010 --> 00:00:37.510 align:middle line:90% Go. 00:00:37.510 --> 00:00:40.070 align:middle line:90% 00:00:40.070 --> 00:00:42.650 align:middle line:90% All right, come on back. 00:00:42.650 --> 00:00:45.020 align:middle line:84% So first of all, Omar should show us his camera. 00:00:45.020 --> 00:00:47.720 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: Do you want to talk about-- oh, yeah. 00:00:47.720 --> 00:00:49.760 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: So I talked about photography. 00:00:49.760 --> 00:00:51.980 align:middle line:84% I spend an unhealthy amount of time on YouTube 00:00:51.980 --> 00:00:53.430 align:middle line:90% with photography tutorials. 00:00:53.430 --> 00:00:56.010 align:middle line:84% And so this camera is a 50-year-old camera, 00:00:56.010 --> 00:00:59.468 align:middle line:84% and I had no idea how to even begin looking for one. 00:00:59.468 --> 00:01:01.010 align:middle line:84% And these last three weeks, I've been 00:01:01.010 --> 00:01:05.060 align:middle line:84% looking because I want to run a CPW event for admits 00:01:05.060 --> 00:01:07.377 align:middle line:90% on how to use an SLR camera. 00:01:07.377 --> 00:01:08.460 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: Isn't that cool? 00:01:08.460 --> 00:01:10.523 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: So I don't know-- 00:01:10.523 --> 00:01:11.940 align:middle line:84% this is in really great condition. 00:01:11.940 --> 00:01:13.590 align:middle line:90% And I was on eBay for hours. 00:01:13.590 --> 00:01:15.660 align:middle line:90% But I watched YouTube tutorials. 00:01:15.660 --> 00:01:19.070 align:middle line:84% I was reading on Reddit forums, photography forums, DPReview, 00:01:19.070 --> 00:01:21.470 align:middle line:84% PetaPixel on what to look out for. 00:01:21.470 --> 00:01:25.432 align:middle line:84% And before that, learning how to actually take photos 00:01:25.432 --> 00:01:26.640 align:middle line:90% was all done through YouTube. 00:01:26.640 --> 00:01:27.600 align:middle line:90% It was self-taught. 00:01:27.600 --> 00:01:29.420 align:middle line:84% I started off with a phone, and then 00:01:29.420 --> 00:01:33.870 align:middle line:84% I slowly built up my toolbox once I had the knowledge. 00:01:33.870 --> 00:01:37.800 align:middle line:84% And yeah, now, I'm the photo editor for The Tech, 00:01:37.800 --> 00:01:39.230 align:middle line:84% I do stuff for yearbook, and now I 00:01:39.230 --> 00:01:40.647 align:middle line:84% do a lot of stuff for photography, 00:01:40.647 --> 00:01:42.440 align:middle line:84% and now I'm actually teaching others. 00:01:42.440 --> 00:01:43.700 align:middle line:84% I recently actually just interviewed-- 00:01:43.700 --> 00:01:44.742 align:middle line:90% I forgot to mention this. 00:01:44.742 --> 00:01:47.580 align:middle line:84% I interviewed to teach a digital photography course, 00:01:47.580 --> 00:01:50.300 align:middle line:84% although, due to time conflicts, I won't be able to do that. 00:01:50.300 --> 00:01:54.650 align:middle line:84% But I did interview, and I was about to go on the other side 00:01:54.650 --> 00:01:57.842 align:middle line:90% of that learning experience. 00:01:57.842 --> 00:01:59.420 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: The camera's rad. 00:01:59.420 --> 00:02:00.050 align:middle line:90% Cool. 00:02:00.050 --> 00:02:02.310 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: I just got it before my last class. 00:02:02.310 --> 00:02:06.290 align:middle line:84% So I need to go to a camera shop, 00:02:06.290 --> 00:02:07.880 align:middle line:84% just to make sure it works, which 00:02:07.880 --> 00:02:10.039 align:middle line:90% I'll be doing after this class. 00:02:10.039 --> 00:02:11.270 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: OK. 00:02:11.270 --> 00:02:13.130 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: I want a photo of that. 00:02:13.130 --> 00:02:14.630 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: I want a photo of Omar 00:02:14.630 --> 00:02:18.356 align:middle line:84% with his new camera taken with a contemporary-- 00:02:18.356 --> 00:02:20.360 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 00:02:20.360 --> 00:02:23.510 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: Yeah, I mean, those Polaroid cameras 00:02:23.510 --> 00:02:25.670 align:middle line:84% became much more widely accessible, probably when 00:02:25.670 --> 00:02:26.820 align:middle line:90% I was in grade school. 00:02:26.820 --> 00:02:27.990 align:middle line:90% They were pretty common. 00:02:27.990 --> 00:02:30.750 align:middle line:84% And then there was a revival in the last few years. 00:02:30.750 --> 00:02:32.630 align:middle line:84% So my daughter has a Polaroid camera. 00:02:32.630 --> 00:02:35.270 align:middle line:84% I don't think it's called-- we call them Polaroid cameras. 00:02:35.270 --> 00:02:37.160 align:middle line:84% They probably have some different term now, 00:02:37.160 --> 00:02:39.290 align:middle line:84% instant camera or something like that. 00:02:39.290 --> 00:02:41.508 align:middle line:84% Anybody have a completely different hobby from Omar, 00:02:41.508 --> 00:02:43.550 align:middle line:84% where you could tell a very similar kind of story 00:02:43.550 --> 00:02:44.200 align:middle line:90% about learning? 00:02:44.200 --> 00:02:49.130 align:middle line:90% 00:02:49.130 --> 00:02:50.870 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: I'm not an expert. 00:02:50.870 --> 00:02:53.510 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: I guess a similar story of learning 00:02:53.510 --> 00:02:56.590 align:middle line:90% is through YouTube, right? 00:02:56.590 --> 00:02:59.230 align:middle line:84% I want to-- or I'm starting to learn 00:02:59.230 --> 00:03:02.320 align:middle line:84% how to play guitar and bass and stuff. 00:03:02.320 --> 00:03:04.030 align:middle line:84% But the thing with YouTube is it's 00:03:04.030 --> 00:03:06.610 align:middle line:84% like, we talk about algorithm-guided learning 00:03:06.610 --> 00:03:08.290 align:middle line:84% or whatever, but it kind of almost 00:03:08.290 --> 00:03:11.440 align:middle line:84% feels like YouTube is algorithm-guided 00:03:11.440 --> 00:03:14.890 align:middle line:84% learning in a way, or I feel like the YouTube 00:03:14.890 --> 00:03:17.530 align:middle line:84% algorithm really drives my interests 00:03:17.530 --> 00:03:20.290 align:middle line:84% or diverts my interests into different things 00:03:20.290 --> 00:03:21.580 align:middle line:90% at different periods of time. 00:03:21.580 --> 00:03:25.160 align:middle line:84% On a week-by-week-- on a week-by-week basis, 00:03:25.160 --> 00:03:28.990 align:middle line:84% I can be interested in something completely different than what 00:03:28.990 --> 00:03:30.650 align:middle line:90% I was interested in last week. 00:03:30.650 --> 00:03:33.220 align:middle line:84% So it feels like I'm just moving through a bunch 00:03:33.220 --> 00:03:35.830 align:middle line:84% of different hobbies because I feel 00:03:35.830 --> 00:03:38.380 align:middle line:84% like I'm at the whim of the YouTube algorithm sometimes. 00:03:38.380 --> 00:03:40.390 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:03:40.390 --> 00:03:41.330 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:03:41.330 --> 00:03:41.830 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:03:41.830 --> 00:03:42.330 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:03:42.330 --> 00:03:47.080 align:middle line:84% No, I think people feel that way with lots of technologies that 00:03:47.080 --> 00:03:49.040 align:middle line:90% do some kind of aggregation. 00:03:49.040 --> 00:03:51.680 align:middle line:84% Pinterest for people who do crafty kinds of things, 00:03:51.680 --> 00:03:54.530 align:middle line:84% TikTok for people who follow media, and stuff like that. 00:03:54.530 --> 00:03:55.540 align:middle line:90% Yeah, good. 00:03:55.540 --> 00:03:57.130 align:middle line:84% What other hobbies do you talk about, 00:03:57.130 --> 00:04:00.840 align:middle line:84% or what other informal learning strategies seem 00:04:00.840 --> 00:04:03.180 align:middle line:84% important and interesting or things that you were 00:04:03.180 --> 00:04:05.740 align:middle line:90% talking about in your groups? 00:04:05.740 --> 00:04:06.240 align:middle line:90% Yeah, Asa? 00:04:06.240 --> 00:04:10.800 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: I'll say, on a less, I guess, hands-on level, 00:04:10.800 --> 00:04:16.500 align:middle line:84% I use similar resources, like YouTube and stuff like that, 00:04:16.500 --> 00:04:20.490 align:middle line:84% for a lot of collecting knowledge for things that 00:04:20.490 --> 00:04:22.890 align:middle line:84% I'm interested in, like fashion, for example, 00:04:22.890 --> 00:04:27.678 align:middle line:90% because a lot of it is like-- 00:04:27.678 --> 00:04:30.000 align:middle line:84% in New York Fashion Week, for example, it's 00:04:30.000 --> 00:04:34.110 align:middle line:84% these very condensed times where it's all happening 00:04:34.110 --> 00:04:35.800 align:middle line:84% and a lot of people follow very closely. 00:04:35.800 --> 00:04:37.925 align:middle line:84% But if you're an MIT student, you're probably like, 00:04:37.925 --> 00:04:39.910 align:middle line:90% I can't be doing that. 00:04:39.910 --> 00:04:43.380 align:middle line:84% But then you can watch highlights from it 00:04:43.380 --> 00:04:47.880 align:middle line:84% and actual critics' commentary on them 00:04:47.880 --> 00:04:54.050 align:middle line:84% and see what that's doing, both socially and also 00:04:54.050 --> 00:04:55.290 align:middle line:90% from an artistic side. 00:04:55.290 --> 00:04:56.082 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: Yeah. 00:04:56.082 --> 00:04:59.060 align:middle line:84% Do you use Pinterest or anything for collecting your-- 00:04:59.060 --> 00:05:02.730 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: I had a social media problem. 00:05:02.730 --> 00:05:05.120 align:middle line:90% So now I just do YouTube. 00:05:05.120 --> 00:05:08.760 align:middle line:84% So I'm kind of just continuing into YouTube and stuff. 00:05:08.760 --> 00:05:11.300 align:middle line:84% But I do get to, I guess, reflect on it because I'm 00:05:11.300 --> 00:05:13.012 align:middle line:90% doing costume design and stuff. 00:05:13.012 --> 00:05:13.970 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: Oh, cool. 00:05:13.970 --> 00:05:16.250 align:middle line:84% My daughter is big into aesthetics 00:05:16.250 --> 00:05:19.410 align:middle line:84% of various kinds, craft things or design things, 00:05:19.410 --> 00:05:21.573 align:middle line:84% and Pinterest is a big part of how she-- 00:05:21.573 --> 00:05:23.490 align:middle line:84% she does the same kind of combing that you do, 00:05:23.490 --> 00:05:25.850 align:middle line:84% but she's deliberate about taking things that she likes 00:05:25.850 --> 00:05:28.490 align:middle line:84% and storing them and categorizing them and trying 00:05:28.490 --> 00:05:31.280 align:middle line:84% to make sense of them and things like that. 00:05:31.280 --> 00:05:32.953 align:middle line:90% Yeah, Dana, then Imran. 00:05:32.953 --> 00:05:34.370 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: I was just going to say, 00:05:34.370 --> 00:05:39.240 align:middle line:84% just another medium outside of watching videos is just online. 00:05:39.240 --> 00:05:40.440 align:middle line:90% So mine is cooking. 00:05:40.440 --> 00:05:43.520 align:middle line:90% So recipes or just articles. 00:05:43.520 --> 00:05:46.340 align:middle line:84% And then also, mine was a little bit of TikTok, 00:05:46.340 --> 00:05:50.060 align:middle line:84% just in the one-minute video of, you can cook this. 00:05:50.060 --> 00:05:52.800 align:middle line:84% And it isn't a professional chef showing you how to do it. 00:05:52.800 --> 00:05:56.650 align:middle line:84% It was cool to see that, oh, I can relate to that person, 00:05:56.650 --> 00:05:58.710 align:middle line:90% so I can do it. 00:05:58.710 --> 00:06:02.730 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: What are your favorite recipe media or cooking 00:06:02.730 --> 00:06:03.260 align:middle line:90% media? 00:06:03.260 --> 00:06:03.760 align:middle line:90% How do you-- 00:06:03.760 --> 00:06:06.420 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: So I've only perfected one singular dish, 00:06:06.420 --> 00:06:11.260 align:middle line:84% and it's scallops, which is a relatively hard thing. 00:06:11.260 --> 00:06:13.830 align:middle line:84% But I'm scared to cook a chicken because I'm going 00:06:13.830 --> 00:06:15.030 align:middle line:90% to give myself salmonella. 00:06:15.030 --> 00:06:18.390 align:middle line:90% But [LAUGHING] scallop. 00:06:18.390 --> 00:06:19.050 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:06:19.050 --> 00:06:21.383 align:middle line:84% So my family joke is, are you only going to eat scallops 00:06:21.383 --> 00:06:22.467 align:middle line:90% for the rest of your life? 00:06:22.467 --> 00:06:23.260 align:middle line:90% I was like, yeah. 00:06:23.260 --> 00:06:24.677 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: They're pretty good. 00:06:24.677 --> 00:06:25.890 align:middle line:90% They're healthy. 00:06:25.890 --> 00:06:27.390 align:middle line:84% There might be too many heavy metals 00:06:27.390 --> 00:06:29.640 align:middle line:84% if you do that your whole life or something like that. 00:06:29.640 --> 00:06:30.270 align:middle line:90% But yeah. 00:06:30.270 --> 00:06:31.770 align:middle line:84% Yeah, I don't know if bottom feeders 00:06:31.770 --> 00:06:33.880 align:middle line:84% are what you should do for your whole life, 00:06:33.880 --> 00:06:36.150 align:middle line:84% but that seems like seems like a good start. 00:06:36.150 --> 00:06:37.830 align:middle line:90% How about you, Imran? 00:06:37.830 --> 00:06:39.820 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: I didn't mention this in our group, 00:06:39.820 --> 00:06:42.400 align:middle line:84% but what came out from people talking, 00:06:42.400 --> 00:06:44.930 align:middle line:84% I feel like a lot of people relate, is Numberphile. 00:06:44.930 --> 00:06:47.590 align:middle line:90% 00:06:47.590 --> 00:06:48.790 align:middle line:90% 3Blue1Brown, this video. 00:06:48.790 --> 00:06:49.585 align:middle line:90% I just put them in. 00:06:49.585 --> 00:06:50.710 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: What is this? 00:06:50.710 --> 00:06:52.230 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: It's a math video. 00:06:52.230 --> 00:06:55.177 align:middle line:84% They just tell you cool math stuff. 00:06:55.177 --> 00:06:56.760 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: It's called Numberphile? 00:06:56.760 --> 00:06:57.530 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: Numberphile. 00:06:57.530 --> 00:06:57.960 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: OK. 00:06:57.960 --> 00:06:58.880 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: 3Blue1Brown. 00:06:58.880 --> 00:07:00.380 align:middle line:90% Those kind of videos. 00:07:00.380 --> 00:07:04.010 align:middle line:84% So sometimes you learn that there is fractional dimension, 00:07:04.010 --> 00:07:07.610 align:middle line:84% and you'd just be watching what that means. 00:07:07.610 --> 00:07:09.890 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: I watch those too sometimes. 00:07:09.890 --> 00:07:11.678 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: They're very interesting. 00:07:11.678 --> 00:07:12.470 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: Yeah. 00:07:12.470 --> 00:07:14.428 align:middle line:84% Who was the guy who came here a couple of years 00:07:14.428 --> 00:07:17.015 align:middle line:84% ago for a graduation or convocation or something? 00:07:17.015 --> 00:07:17.890 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: Mark Rober? 00:07:17.890 --> 00:07:18.350 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: Hm? 00:07:18.350 --> 00:07:19.050 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: Mark Rober. 00:07:19.050 --> 00:07:19.680 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: Mark Rober. 00:07:19.680 --> 00:07:20.030 align:middle line:90% Yep. 00:07:20.030 --> 00:07:20.460 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:07:20.460 --> 00:07:20.630 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:07:20.630 --> 00:07:21.870 align:middle line:90% He's a science YouTuber. 00:07:21.870 --> 00:07:25.590 align:middle line:84% A guy named Veritasium does things like that, too. 00:07:25.590 --> 00:07:26.090 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:07:26.090 --> 00:07:26.590 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:07:26.590 --> 00:07:31.700 align:middle line:84% Enormously popular and successful and things like that. 00:07:31.700 --> 00:07:35.287 align:middle line:84% I play a lot of computer games, and my life overlaps. 00:07:35.287 --> 00:07:37.370 align:middle line:84% I don't know, computer games are a couple of years 00:07:37.370 --> 00:07:38.790 align:middle line:90% older than me, but not by much. 00:07:38.790 --> 00:07:40.748 align:middle line:84% I mean, definitely some of my earliest memories 00:07:40.748 --> 00:07:44.400 align:middle line:84% are games that would have been played off of a cassette reel, 00:07:44.400 --> 00:07:48.260 align:middle line:84% rather than any kind of rotary disk or something like that. 00:07:48.260 --> 00:07:50.620 align:middle line:84% But another distinctive memory is 00:07:50.620 --> 00:07:52.690 align:middle line:84% that one of the first categories of games 00:07:52.690 --> 00:07:54.910 align:middle line:84% were these text-based games, where 00:07:54.910 --> 00:07:58.610 align:middle line:84% you had to enter prompts into a parser, like open mailbox, 00:07:58.610 --> 00:08:02.900 align:middle line:84% go left, go right, walk in, pick up key, put key in lock, 00:08:02.900 --> 00:08:03.860 align:middle line:90% those kinds of things. 00:08:03.860 --> 00:08:05.943 align:middle line:84% So a lot of what you're doing-- yeah, come on in-- 00:08:05.943 --> 00:08:10.510 align:middle line:84% was kind of guessing what was the right key term 00:08:10.510 --> 00:08:13.125 align:middle line:90% to put in to engage things. 00:08:13.125 --> 00:08:14.750 align:middle line:84% And so actually, a lot of these games-- 00:08:14.750 --> 00:08:17.020 align:middle line:84% Infocom was a company that sold a lot of them-- 00:08:17.020 --> 00:08:19.280 align:middle line:84% the game companies would also publish a book. 00:08:19.280 --> 00:08:21.910 align:middle line:84% And the book would have the answers 00:08:21.910 --> 00:08:25.070 align:middle line:84% to a whole bunch of things or solution sets in invisible ink. 00:08:25.070 --> 00:08:27.805 align:middle line:84% And so you had a little pen that came with it. 00:08:27.805 --> 00:08:29.680 align:middle line:84% And so when you decided that you had given up 00:08:29.680 --> 00:08:33.460 align:middle line:84% trying for yourself, you would cover the invisible ink 00:08:33.460 --> 00:08:35.830 align:middle line:84% with this pen that would reveal the next clue 00:08:35.830 --> 00:08:39.900 align:middle line:90% and help you go on and so forth. 00:08:39.900 --> 00:08:44.169 align:middle line:84% But now, essentially every video game, they almost instantly 00:08:44.169 --> 00:08:48.890 align:middle line:84% are created with a wiki that has every item in the game 00:08:48.890 --> 00:08:51.230 align:middle line:84% and what they do and where they go. 00:08:51.230 --> 00:08:54.440 align:middle line:90% A Reddit forum for conversation. 00:08:54.440 --> 00:08:58.100 align:middle line:84% More recently, Discord pages that 00:08:58.100 --> 00:09:01.250 align:middle line:84% actually, for smaller games, can be kind of surprisingly 00:09:01.250 --> 00:09:02.870 align:middle line:84% intimate, where you really do feel 00:09:02.870 --> 00:09:04.828 align:middle line:84% like you're just like chatting with the guy who 00:09:04.828 --> 00:09:07.310 align:middle line:84% made the game, even if they may not 00:09:07.310 --> 00:09:08.640 align:middle line:90% be responding to you directly. 00:09:08.640 --> 00:09:11.000 align:middle line:84% But they're certainly responding to people that are there around 00:09:11.000 --> 00:09:12.250 align:middle line:90% with you and things like that. 00:09:12.250 --> 00:09:14.600 align:middle line:84% YouTube channels or all these kinds of things. 00:09:14.600 --> 00:09:17.070 align:middle line:84% Yeah, I think there's all kinds of ways. 00:09:17.070 --> 00:09:20.990 align:middle line:84% There are very few people, I think, left 00:09:20.990 --> 00:09:26.510 align:middle line:84% in the networked world who don't have some kind of encounter 00:09:26.510 --> 00:09:28.850 align:middle line:84% with this sort of informal learning. 00:09:28.850 --> 00:09:33.560 align:middle line:84% I think just an enormous number of people in a very short period 00:09:33.560 --> 00:09:34.080 align:middle line:90% of time-- 00:09:34.080 --> 00:09:35.580 align:middle line:84% I mean, obviously, there have always 00:09:35.580 --> 00:09:38.100 align:middle line:84% been people who do DIY kinds of things and stuff like that, 00:09:38.100 --> 00:09:42.800 align:middle line:84% but the degree to which online resources has shaped those 00:09:42.800 --> 00:09:46.630 align:middle line:84% learning interactions is a profound change 00:09:46.630 --> 00:09:49.220 align:middle line:90% over the last decade or two. 00:09:49.220 --> 00:09:54.170 align:middle line:84% And I think it reminds us to do a few things that are useful. 00:09:54.170 --> 00:10:00.580 align:middle line:84% One is to conceptualize learning really broadly. 00:10:00.580 --> 00:10:02.330 align:middle line:84% A lot of times, when we think of learning, 00:10:02.330 --> 00:10:06.077 align:middle line:84% we pin it down in education, K-12 education, 00:10:06.077 --> 00:10:07.160 align:middle line:90% college, things like that. 00:10:07.160 --> 00:10:10.600 align:middle line:84% But that's a relatively small part of people's lives. 00:10:10.600 --> 00:10:12.770 align:middle line:84% People are learning all throughout their lives, 00:10:12.770 --> 00:10:13.990 align:middle line:90% all the time. 00:10:13.990 --> 00:10:16.172 align:middle line:84% People are developing new skills for work. 00:10:16.172 --> 00:10:18.380 align:middle line:84% They're developing new skills around their interests. 00:10:18.380 --> 00:10:19.943 align:middle line:90% They're pursuing passions. 00:10:19.943 --> 00:10:21.110 align:middle line:90% They're doing whatever else. 00:10:21.110 --> 00:10:22.570 align:middle line:84% And so I think it's very helpful, 00:10:22.570 --> 00:10:24.130 align:middle line:84% when thinking about online learning, 00:10:24.130 --> 00:10:27.800 align:middle line:84% to be really open to all these kinds of things. 00:10:27.800 --> 00:10:30.970 align:middle line:84% And then I would say, if there's a core argument 00:10:30.970 --> 00:10:33.530 align:middle line:84% in peer-guided learning at scale, 00:10:33.530 --> 00:10:36.010 align:middle line:84% it's that these technologies have 00:10:36.010 --> 00:10:39.490 align:middle line:84% been so profound in changing the ways 00:10:39.490 --> 00:10:42.080 align:middle line:84% that we pursue learning outside of school, 00:10:42.080 --> 00:10:44.940 align:middle line:84% and schools have proven to be institutions 00:10:44.940 --> 00:10:48.600 align:middle line:84% that are just remarkably resistant to these forms 00:10:48.600 --> 00:10:49.840 align:middle line:90% of learning as well. 00:10:49.840 --> 00:10:52.860 align:middle line:84% My hunch is most of you don't have an experience where 00:10:52.860 --> 00:10:55.050 align:middle line:84% you feel like, yeah, the kind of learning 00:10:55.050 --> 00:10:57.300 align:middle line:84% that I did in my eighth grade physics class 00:10:57.300 --> 00:10:59.010 align:middle line:84% was really just like the kind of learning 00:10:59.010 --> 00:11:01.950 align:middle line:84% that I did to learn photography or something like that. 00:11:01.950 --> 00:11:05.940 align:middle line:84% There's something about schools and the design and organization 00:11:05.940 --> 00:11:08.700 align:middle line:84% of schools that makes it really hard for these kinds of learning 00:11:08.700 --> 00:11:11.550 align:middle line:84% environments to make their way in. 00:11:11.550 --> 00:11:14.400 align:middle line:84% I think a lot of what I want to share with you today 00:11:14.400 --> 00:11:16.960 align:middle line:84% are some of the most substantial efforts, 00:11:16.960 --> 00:11:19.180 align:middle line:84% particularly in higher education, 00:11:19.180 --> 00:11:21.750 align:middle line:84% to figure out how some of these approaches 00:11:21.750 --> 00:11:26.850 align:middle line:84% to peer-guided learning at scale could make their way 00:11:26.850 --> 00:11:30.150 align:middle line:90% into formal institutions. 00:11:30.150 --> 00:11:33.930 align:middle line:84% The ideas that I am presenting to you, if I was talking about 00:11:33.930 --> 00:11:37.800 align:middle line:84% them 10 years ago, I would have positioned them more as, 00:11:37.800 --> 00:11:43.300 align:middle line:84% these are very viable ways in which at least higher education, 00:11:43.300 --> 00:11:45.110 align:middle line:84% maybe a number of forms of education, 00:11:45.110 --> 00:11:48.680 align:middle line:84% might substantially change in the next 5 or 10 years. 00:11:48.680 --> 00:11:52.700 align:middle line:84% And I think I'm more likely to present you them today 00:11:52.700 --> 00:11:55.350 align:middle line:84% as an interesting dead end, as a set of things 00:11:55.350 --> 00:11:57.350 align:middle line:84% that people were trying, putting a lot of effort 00:11:57.350 --> 00:11:59.090 align:middle line:84% behind, putting a lot of design behind, 00:11:59.090 --> 00:12:04.100 align:middle line:84% and really didn't have much impact in how 00:12:04.100 --> 00:12:06.800 align:middle line:84% especially higher education, in how 00:12:06.800 --> 00:12:10.370 align:middle line:84% formal education of all kinds are organized. 00:12:10.370 --> 00:12:13.418 align:middle line:84% Studying things that flop is good. 00:12:13.418 --> 00:12:15.710 align:middle line:84% We're going to come back to this a few different times. 00:12:15.710 --> 00:12:17.585 align:middle line:84% Studying things that flop is really important 00:12:17.585 --> 00:12:19.560 align:middle line:90% to figure out why things work. 00:12:19.560 --> 00:12:21.667 align:middle line:84% If you just study things that work, 00:12:21.667 --> 00:12:23.250 align:middle line:84% you actually don't know why they work. 00:12:23.250 --> 00:12:24.708 align:middle line:84% You know characteristics they have, 00:12:24.708 --> 00:12:26.210 align:middle line:84% but there's lots of things that are 00:12:26.210 --> 00:12:28.793 align:middle line:84% in common between things that work and things that don't work. 00:12:28.793 --> 00:12:33.925 align:middle line:84% And so that's what we'll delve into some today. 00:12:33.925 --> 00:12:35.300 align:middle line:84% Maybe I'll talk for a little bit, 00:12:35.300 --> 00:12:36.540 align:middle line:84% and then see what kind of thoughts you have. 00:12:36.540 --> 00:12:37.040 align:middle line:90% All right. 00:12:37.040 --> 00:12:38.850 align:middle line:84% So I think we did the Rainbow Loom story. 00:12:38.850 --> 00:12:40.440 align:middle line:84% We talked about this the other day. 00:12:40.440 --> 00:12:43.080 align:middle line:84% This is one, I think, iconic moment 00:12:43.080 --> 00:12:48.030 align:middle line:84% of the creation of a new craft generates 00:12:48.030 --> 00:12:51.750 align:middle line:90% these new kinds of communities. 00:12:51.750 --> 00:12:53.910 align:middle line:90% This was from 2013. 00:12:53.910 --> 00:12:55.450 align:middle line:84% "Low tech but high on creativity, 00:12:55.450 --> 00:12:56.950 align:middle line:84% the Rainbow Loom has kids hooked-- 00:12:56.950 --> 00:12:59.740 align:middle line:84% spending hours after school and on weekends making bracelets 00:12:59.740 --> 00:13:03.330 align:middle line:84% weaving together small, colorful rubber bands on a simple plastic 00:13:03.330 --> 00:13:04.170 align:middle line:90% loom." 00:13:04.170 --> 00:13:10.480 align:middle line:84% And all of the narrative around Rainbow Loom was, man, look, 00:13:10.480 --> 00:13:12.070 align:middle line:84% we finally got kids off their phones. 00:13:12.070 --> 00:13:15.570 align:middle line:84% We finally got kids in the real world connecting to one another. 00:13:15.570 --> 00:13:18.300 align:middle line:84% This is, I think, 2013, that this was published right 00:13:18.300 --> 00:13:19.860 align:middle line:90% before Christmas. 00:13:19.860 --> 00:13:23.627 align:middle line:84% But of course, the kids were on their phones 00:13:23.627 --> 00:13:25.960 align:middle line:84% the whole time that they were playing with Rainbow Loom. 00:13:25.960 --> 00:13:28.320 align:middle line:84% And so this is Ashley and Steph who 00:13:28.320 --> 00:13:30.878 align:middle line:84% were these two girls who have a quarter 00:13:30.878 --> 00:13:32.170 align:middle line:90% of a million people subscribed. 00:13:32.170 --> 00:13:34.878 align:middle line:84% Oh, this is, yeah, how to make a Rainbow Loom Starburst bracelet. 00:13:34.878 --> 00:13:37.680 align:middle line:84% Whenever I recorded this, 30 million views, 00:13:37.680 --> 00:13:40.400 align:middle line:84% probably 10 times as many that were on the official Rainbow 00:13:40.400 --> 00:13:44.030 align:middle line:84% Loom Starburst page, that somehow these two 00:13:44.030 --> 00:13:46.528 align:middle line:90% kids had captivated-- 00:13:46.528 --> 00:13:47.070 align:middle line:90% I don't know. 00:13:47.070 --> 00:13:48.570 align:middle line:84% It's hard to say that it was millions of people, 00:13:48.570 --> 00:13:50.862 align:middle line:84% because it actually could have been a couple of hundred 00:13:50.862 --> 00:13:53.150 align:middle line:84% thousand people each watched this 10 or 20 times 00:13:53.150 --> 00:13:55.970 align:middle line:84% because it's super hard to make one of these bracelets. 00:13:55.970 --> 00:14:05.390 align:middle line:84% But I think a compelling example of how network learning was. 00:14:05.390 --> 00:14:08.780 align:middle line:84% And something like this, if you're my age, 00:14:08.780 --> 00:14:12.050 align:middle line:84% looking at this in 2013, it's really hard 00:14:12.050 --> 00:14:17.030 align:middle line:84% to imagine something similar happening in 1990 00:14:17.030 --> 00:14:18.350 align:middle line:90% or something like that. 00:14:18.350 --> 00:14:20.430 align:middle line:84% If someone had invented a new kind of craft, 00:14:20.430 --> 00:14:22.640 align:middle line:84% you would have had to go to a craft store, 00:14:22.640 --> 00:14:25.140 align:middle line:84% you would have had to join a club, you had to go to classes, 00:14:25.140 --> 00:14:28.160 align:middle line:84% there would have to be a college club or something like that. 00:14:28.160 --> 00:14:32.570 align:middle line:84% I mean, maybe PBS would put on a television show about it. 00:14:32.570 --> 00:14:35.300 align:middle line:84% You could imagine the Bob Ross of Rainbow Loom or something 00:14:35.300 --> 00:14:36.440 align:middle line:90% like that. 00:14:36.440 --> 00:14:42.400 align:middle line:84% But very hard to imagine the same kind of highly 00:14:42.400 --> 00:14:47.410 align:middle line:84% decentralized mechanism by which learners 00:14:47.410 --> 00:14:49.190 align:middle line:84% connect themselves to each other. 00:14:49.190 --> 00:14:50.648 align:middle line:84% I think one of the things I'm going 00:14:50.648 --> 00:14:52.790 align:middle line:84% to ask you to read for an upcoming week-- 00:14:52.790 --> 00:14:54.940 align:middle line:84% I can't remember if it's next week, 00:14:54.940 --> 00:14:59.380 align:middle line:84% but this piece by Ivan Illich called "Deschooling Society." 00:14:59.380 --> 00:15:01.900 align:middle line:84% I think it's written in the 1960s. 00:15:01.900 --> 00:15:04.300 align:middle line:90% And he almost exactly-- 00:15:04.300 --> 00:15:06.410 align:middle line:90% the very dawn of computing. 00:15:06.410 --> 00:15:11.020 align:middle line:84% And he predicts learning networks that emerge like this. 00:15:11.020 --> 00:15:12.347 align:middle line:90% He says, one day-- 00:15:12.347 --> 00:15:14.180 align:middle line:84% I mean, he has a funny way of describing it. 00:15:14.180 --> 00:15:17.147 align:middle line:84% He says, one day, there's going to be a bunch of learners 00:15:17.147 --> 00:15:19.480 align:middle line:84% who write down the things they're interested in learning 00:15:19.480 --> 00:15:22.105 align:middle line:84% on punch cards, because that's what were computers at the time, 00:15:22.105 --> 00:15:24.280 align:middle line:84% and there's going to be a bunch of experts who share 00:15:24.280 --> 00:15:25.790 align:middle line:90% their interests on punch cards. 00:15:25.790 --> 00:15:27.100 align:middle line:84% And the computers are going to connect these punch 00:15:27.100 --> 00:15:29.582 align:middle line:84% cards together and get people teaching and learning 00:15:29.582 --> 00:15:30.290 align:middle line:90% from one another. 00:15:30.290 --> 00:15:33.080 align:middle line:84% And it turned out, we had YouTube rather than punch cards, 00:15:33.080 --> 00:15:35.876 align:middle line:84% but it was a pretty similar kind of phenomenon. 00:15:35.876 --> 00:15:41.000 align:middle line:90% 00:15:41.000 --> 00:15:44.780 align:middle line:84% In the early 2010s, there were some people who were 00:15:44.780 --> 00:15:46.962 align:middle line:84% particularly enthusiastic about the fact-- 00:15:46.962 --> 00:15:48.920 align:middle line:84% so one thing about Rainbow Loom, you could say, 00:15:48.920 --> 00:15:51.500 align:middle line:84% is something like, well, all right, so some kids figured out 00:15:51.500 --> 00:15:52.920 align:middle line:90% how to make plastic bracelets. 00:15:52.920 --> 00:15:54.290 align:middle line:90% That's OK. 00:15:54.290 --> 00:15:57.650 align:middle line:84% But there are people who achieved 00:15:57.650 --> 00:16:01.400 align:middle line:84% elite levels of performance in a variety of different disciplines 00:16:01.400 --> 00:16:05.630 align:middle line:84% and domains by following the same kinds of practices 00:16:05.630 --> 00:16:07.950 align:middle line:84% that the Rainbow Loom kids were using. 00:16:07.950 --> 00:16:10.680 align:middle line:84% So there's a guy named Julius Yego who, as I recall, 00:16:10.680 --> 00:16:12.690 align:middle line:84% won a silver medal in the Olympics. 00:16:12.690 --> 00:16:15.270 align:middle line:84% He was from Kenya, and he was a javelin thrower. 00:16:15.270 --> 00:16:17.520 align:middle line:84% There are no field athletes in Kenya. 00:16:17.520 --> 00:16:19.130 align:middle line:90% They're all track runners. 00:16:19.130 --> 00:16:22.440 align:middle line:84% And for whatever reason, Julius Yego got it in his head, 00:16:22.440 --> 00:16:25.550 align:middle line:84% I'm going to be a javelin thrower. 00:16:25.550 --> 00:16:27.140 align:middle line:90% I mean, it's here. 00:16:27.140 --> 00:16:29.360 align:middle line:84% "My coach is me, and the YouTube videos." 00:16:29.360 --> 00:16:32.330 align:middle line:84% And he became an elite, globally recognized-- 00:16:32.330 --> 00:16:34.470 align:middle line:84% I mean, there's a moment where this tips. 00:16:34.470 --> 00:16:37.240 align:middle line:84% There's a moment where he goes to a track and field 00:16:37.240 --> 00:16:38.638 align:middle line:90% competition. 00:16:38.638 --> 00:16:40.930 align:middle line:84% He doesn't really have a coach, and he throws a javelin 00:16:40.930 --> 00:16:41.450 align:middle line:90% pretty far. 00:16:41.450 --> 00:16:42.850 align:middle line:84% And some people notice him and take him 00:16:42.850 --> 00:16:44.308 align:middle line:84% under his wing and stuff like that. 00:16:44.308 --> 00:16:47.500 align:middle line:84% So it's not just YouTube videos that get you entirely 00:16:47.500 --> 00:16:50.830 align:middle line:84% to being the second best javelin thrower in the world, 00:16:50.830 --> 00:16:53.090 align:middle line:90% but going quite a long way. 00:16:53.090 --> 00:16:56.110 align:middle line:84% There's echoes of this, of the story that I told you before 00:16:56.110 --> 00:17:00.410 align:middle line:84% of Battushig, the boy genius of Ulaanbaatar, 00:17:00.410 --> 00:17:03.762 align:middle line:84% the kid who discovered in Mongolia, through MITx 00:17:03.762 --> 00:17:05.470 align:middle line:84% and things like this, the idea that these 00:17:05.470 --> 00:17:08.619 align:middle line:84% could have these profound democratizing effects. 00:17:08.619 --> 00:17:12.310 align:middle line:84% You don't have to be in a country that 00:17:12.310 --> 00:17:15.579 align:middle line:84% has a really big track and field infrastructure 00:17:15.579 --> 00:17:17.390 align:middle line:84% to be able to become a great athlete. 00:17:17.390 --> 00:17:21.040 align:middle line:84% You can do it anywhere because we have YouTube now. 00:17:21.040 --> 00:17:28.810 align:middle line:84% So I was working for HarvardX in 2013. 00:17:28.810 --> 00:17:33.010 align:middle line:84% Maybe I'll pause to tell this story too. 00:17:33.010 --> 00:17:35.100 align:middle line:84% Well, I don't know what the right order is now 00:17:35.100 --> 00:17:36.100 align:middle line:90% that I'm inspired by it. 00:17:36.100 --> 00:17:40.000 align:middle line:84% But there was this term, massive open online courses, 00:17:40.000 --> 00:17:43.050 align:middle line:84% and it actually was not originally applied 00:17:43.050 --> 00:17:47.820 align:middle line:84% to the courses that came out of Coursera and edX and MITx 00:17:47.820 --> 00:17:49.330 align:middle line:84% and Udacity and things like that. 00:17:49.330 --> 00:17:51.540 align:middle line:84% There were a group of Canadian educators 00:17:51.540 --> 00:17:56.400 align:middle line:84% who, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, started building 00:17:56.400 --> 00:17:59.220 align:middle line:90% these networked courses. 00:17:59.220 --> 00:18:01.810 align:middle line:84% I'll go more into the details of the network courses, 00:18:01.810 --> 00:18:05.170 align:middle line:84% but you would basically create an online learning environment, 00:18:05.170 --> 00:18:08.920 align:middle line:84% have people create blogs, connect on Twitter, 00:18:08.920 --> 00:18:11.200 align:middle line:84% form social network connections with one another, 00:18:11.200 --> 00:18:13.883 align:middle line:84% and all be studying the same thing at the same time. 00:18:13.883 --> 00:18:16.050 align:middle line:84% Sometimes some of the people would be getting credit 00:18:16.050 --> 00:18:17.700 align:middle line:84% from some institution and other people 00:18:17.700 --> 00:18:18.867 align:middle line:90% would not be getting credit. 00:18:18.867 --> 00:18:21.150 align:middle line:84% They were all kind of openly being involved. 00:18:21.150 --> 00:18:23.460 align:middle line:84% A few thousand people, probably the largest 00:18:23.460 --> 00:18:25.390 align:middle line:90% of these, signing up. 00:18:25.390 --> 00:18:26.910 align:middle line:84% And so there was actually a reporter 00:18:26.910 --> 00:18:29.650 align:middle line:84% who, when edX and Coursera got started, 00:18:29.650 --> 00:18:32.630 align:middle line:84% was trying to figure out what these things should be called. 00:18:32.630 --> 00:18:34.910 align:middle line:84% And somebody said, well, these Canadian guys 00:18:34.910 --> 00:18:37.380 align:middle line:84% have these things called massive open online courses. 00:18:37.380 --> 00:18:40.310 align:middle line:84% And the name stuck, but it stuck to describe something very, very 00:18:40.310 --> 00:18:41.510 align:middle line:90% different. 00:18:41.510 --> 00:18:45.020 align:middle line:84% One of the things that we recognize early on 00:18:45.020 --> 00:18:47.690 align:middle line:84% is that, in the early days of people 00:18:47.690 --> 00:18:50.390 align:middle line:84% doing the massive open online courses that came out 00:18:50.390 --> 00:18:54.590 align:middle line:84% of Harvard and MIT, is many of them were not just using 00:18:54.590 --> 00:18:56.750 align:middle line:84% the course materials that were being provided 00:18:56.750 --> 00:18:58.550 align:middle line:84% on these platforms, but they were using 00:18:58.550 --> 00:18:59.820 align:middle line:90% all kinds of other things. 00:18:59.820 --> 00:19:02.940 align:middle line:84% So you'd ask people and they're like, yeah, well, 00:19:02.940 --> 00:19:05.280 align:middle line:84% we're searching for all kinds of things that show up. 00:19:05.280 --> 00:19:07.310 align:middle line:84% We're reading the Wikipedia entries 00:19:07.310 --> 00:19:09.330 align:middle line:84% about the things that show up in these classes. 00:19:09.330 --> 00:19:12.110 align:middle line:84% We're buying additional books that are around them. 00:19:12.110 --> 00:19:14.250 align:middle line:84% We're looking for those books on Google Books. 00:19:14.250 --> 00:19:16.310 align:middle line:84% We're joining Facebook groups of people 00:19:16.310 --> 00:19:19.400 align:middle line:84% who are studying these courses together and things like that. 00:19:19.400 --> 00:19:25.070 align:middle line:84% And so the barriers between these instructor-guided learning 00:19:25.070 --> 00:19:27.620 align:middle line:84% at scale, these highly structured learning management 00:19:27.620 --> 00:19:31.040 align:middle line:84% system kinds of things, and the informal world 00:19:31.040 --> 00:19:35.010 align:middle line:84% of people messing around on YouTube, learning about stuff, 00:19:35.010 --> 00:19:35.950 align:middle line:90% smushed together. 00:19:35.950 --> 00:19:38.310 align:middle line:84% Probably a bunch of you have some kind of experience 00:19:38.310 --> 00:19:40.240 align:middle line:90% of that in your classes too. 00:19:40.240 --> 00:19:42.323 align:middle line:84% I mean, presumably all of you, when 00:19:42.323 --> 00:19:43.990 align:middle line:84% you don't understand something in class, 00:19:43.990 --> 00:19:45.698 align:middle line:84% you're looking up online videos about it. 00:19:45.698 --> 00:19:47.835 align:middle line:84% Or you don't like the lecture and, probably 00:19:47.835 --> 00:19:49.210 align:middle line:84% mostly in your technical classes, 00:19:49.210 --> 00:19:50.668 align:middle line:84% you watch it from some other place. 00:19:50.668 --> 00:19:52.530 align:middle line:84% Or I don't know, do any of you join groups 00:19:52.530 --> 00:19:55.140 align:middle line:84% or find communities of people who 00:19:55.140 --> 00:19:57.752 align:middle line:84% are good at solving problems in the things 00:19:57.752 --> 00:19:58.835 align:middle line:90% that you're interested in? 00:19:58.835 --> 00:20:01.353 align:middle line:90% 00:20:01.353 --> 00:20:03.270 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: One thing about being an MIT student 00:20:03.270 --> 00:20:05.470 align:middle line:84% is you can go on OCW if you miss a lecture 00:20:05.470 --> 00:20:06.970 align:middle line:84% or you don't understand the lecture, 00:20:06.970 --> 00:20:08.220 align:middle line:84% you want to expand it in a different way 00:20:08.220 --> 00:20:09.520 align:middle line:90% from a different professor. 00:20:09.520 --> 00:20:11.550 align:middle line:84% You can just watch that same lecture, 00:20:11.550 --> 00:20:14.320 align:middle line:84% which I've done before for some of my more technical classes. 00:20:14.320 --> 00:20:14.640 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: Yeah. 00:20:14.640 --> 00:20:15.190 align:middle line:90% So yeah. 00:20:15.190 --> 00:20:17.260 align:middle line:90% So you can rewatch past things. 00:20:17.260 --> 00:20:19.230 align:middle line:84% Some professors are pretty explicit about that. 00:20:19.230 --> 00:20:20.980 align:middle line:84% They'll be like, well, this is my lecture, 00:20:20.980 --> 00:20:24.250 align:middle line:84% but somebody else filmed roughly the same course four years ago. 00:20:24.250 --> 00:20:25.973 align:middle line:84% And you can watch all those things. 00:20:25.973 --> 00:20:27.390 align:middle line:84% How many of your classes still use 00:20:27.390 --> 00:20:31.490 align:middle line:84% Piazza or some kind of discussion forum things? 00:20:31.490 --> 00:20:34.080 align:middle line:84% Are the Piazza forums ever insufficient, 00:20:34.080 --> 00:20:36.140 align:middle line:84% and then you go to Stack Overflow 00:20:36.140 --> 00:20:38.885 align:middle line:84% or to some other kind of-- maybe for your coding classes 00:20:38.885 --> 00:20:39.760 align:middle line:90% and things like that? 00:20:39.760 --> 00:20:44.120 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: I would say, Piazza has a weird social dynamic 00:20:44.120 --> 00:20:45.990 align:middle line:90% in itself. 00:20:45.990 --> 00:20:48.200 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: Tell me more. 00:20:48.200 --> 00:20:50.330 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: I think it's like-- 00:20:50.330 --> 00:20:53.660 align:middle line:84% I mean, obviously you can both do anonymous questions 00:20:53.660 --> 00:20:54.990 align:middle line:90% and non-anonymous questions. 00:20:54.990 --> 00:21:01.250 align:middle line:84% But usually it seems like it really depends on-- 00:21:01.250 --> 00:21:04.580 align:middle line:84% a little bit on who's really using it, 00:21:04.580 --> 00:21:09.800 align:middle line:84% and also, how responsive the faculty and stuff are 00:21:09.800 --> 00:21:12.600 align:middle line:90% and how they choose to respond. 00:21:12.600 --> 00:21:18.080 align:middle line:84% Because I have it in quite a few classes where I log on, 00:21:18.080 --> 00:21:21.350 align:middle line:84% and then it's like, yes, I had that question. 00:21:21.350 --> 00:21:24.020 align:middle line:84% And they're like, oh, sorry, we worded the question weird. 00:21:24.020 --> 00:21:26.480 align:middle line:84% But then I've also been in quite a few classes where 00:21:26.480 --> 00:21:30.580 align:middle line:84% it's like, they're asking this super high-level question 00:21:30.580 --> 00:21:32.630 align:middle line:90% about the lecture. 00:21:32.630 --> 00:21:36.560 align:middle line:84% And then it kind of sets that expectation for the class, 00:21:36.560 --> 00:21:38.990 align:middle line:84% especially if it's a larger class, of, oh, 00:21:38.990 --> 00:21:42.610 align:middle line:84% my, quote unquote, "dumb" questions aren't going to be 00:21:42.610 --> 00:21:43.430 align:middle line:90% answered here. 00:21:43.430 --> 00:21:45.190 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: It's not going to be respected or things 00:21:45.190 --> 00:21:45.650 align:middle line:90% like that. 00:21:45.650 --> 00:21:46.150 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:21:46.150 --> 00:21:49.760 align:middle line:84% And I mean, because these things are social in nature, 00:21:49.760 --> 00:21:51.610 align:middle line:84% I bet a lot of those things can be 00:21:51.610 --> 00:21:54.460 align:middle line:84% determined pretty early on by the actions 00:21:54.460 --> 00:21:56.110 align:middle line:90% of a couple of people. 00:21:56.110 --> 00:21:58.570 align:middle line:84% When we were studying massive open online courses, one 00:21:58.570 --> 00:22:00.850 align:middle line:84% of the things we found in the discussion forums, 00:22:00.850 --> 00:22:04.160 align:middle line:84% the largest threads, the most upvoted kinds of things, 00:22:04.160 --> 00:22:08.450 align:middle line:84% were almost always amongst the very first topics posted. 00:22:08.450 --> 00:22:12.130 align:middle line:84% So it wasn't like the forums were surfacing-- 00:22:12.130 --> 00:22:14.510 align:middle line:84% it wasn't like there was lots of ideas, 00:22:14.510 --> 00:22:16.750 align:middle line:84% and the most interesting or important of those ideas 00:22:16.750 --> 00:22:17.833 align:middle line:90% were surfacing at the top. 00:22:17.833 --> 00:22:20.210 align:middle line:84% It was like somebody jumped in there first, 00:22:20.210 --> 00:22:23.080 align:middle line:84% and then people started talking about those things. 00:22:23.080 --> 00:22:25.900 align:middle line:84% And you could imagine an alternate timeline 00:22:25.900 --> 00:22:28.290 align:middle line:84% of the exact same course you were in, where the first two 00:22:28.290 --> 00:22:30.150 align:middle line:84% people to post happened to just be 00:22:30.150 --> 00:22:31.320 align:middle line:84% people who were like, I don't understand 00:22:31.320 --> 00:22:32.140 align:middle line:90% this really basic thing. 00:22:32.140 --> 00:22:33.390 align:middle line:90% Will someone explain it again? 00:22:33.390 --> 00:22:37.300 align:middle line:84% And the forums have a whole different character to them. 00:22:37.300 --> 00:22:39.810 align:middle line:84% I mean, to some extent, I think of computer programming 00:22:39.810 --> 00:22:42.270 align:middle line:84% in particular as a field that depends 00:22:42.270 --> 00:22:44.610 align:middle line:84% upon this kind of informal learning, 00:22:44.610 --> 00:22:48.072 align:middle line:84% that basically no one knows enough about programming 00:22:48.072 --> 00:22:50.530 align:middle line:84% languages and how they operate and how they solve problems. 00:22:50.530 --> 00:22:53.460 align:middle line:84% And so you essentially can't do that profession 00:22:53.460 --> 00:22:55.452 align:middle line:84% if you can't figure out how to navigate 00:22:55.452 --> 00:22:57.660 align:middle line:84% all the online resources, all the online communities, 00:22:57.660 --> 00:22:58.535 align:middle line:90% and things like that. 00:22:58.535 --> 00:23:02.970 align:middle line:84% And unusually, you can be promoted 00:23:02.970 --> 00:23:07.170 align:middle line:84% and thrive in those communities through your participation 00:23:07.170 --> 00:23:09.400 align:middle line:84% in some of these kind of informal learning networks. 00:23:09.400 --> 00:23:13.290 align:middle line:84% You can be really active in creating open source projects 00:23:13.290 --> 00:23:15.983 align:middle line:84% or just be a really active contributor to Stack Overflow 00:23:15.983 --> 00:23:17.650 align:middle line:84% or other kinds of communities like that, 00:23:17.650 --> 00:23:19.350 align:middle line:84% get recognized for your contributions, 00:23:19.350 --> 00:23:21.910 align:middle line:84% and have that translate into other kinds of opportunities. 00:23:21.910 --> 00:23:25.240 align:middle line:90% So the boundaries between-- 00:23:25.240 --> 00:23:27.473 align:middle line:84% there are ways that I think these informal learning 00:23:27.473 --> 00:23:29.390 align:middle line:84% environments and formal learning environments, 00:23:29.390 --> 00:23:31.150 align:middle line:84% the boundaries can permeate, even 00:23:31.150 --> 00:23:33.490 align:middle line:84% if, as we'll keep talking about, just trying 00:23:33.490 --> 00:23:35.772 align:middle line:84% to take the whole informal, peer-guided learning 00:23:35.772 --> 00:23:37.480 align:middle line:84% infrastructure and bringing it to schools 00:23:37.480 --> 00:23:39.645 align:middle line:90% seems not to work pretty well. 00:23:39.645 --> 00:23:42.160 align:middle line:90% 00:23:42.160 --> 00:23:46.840 align:middle line:84% I think, actually, one of the most compelling reasons 00:23:46.840 --> 00:23:50.620 align:middle line:84% for integrating technology into people's school learning at all 00:23:50.620 --> 00:23:54.500 align:middle line:84% is the idea that, actually, for most of your lives, 00:23:54.500 --> 00:23:57.370 align:middle line:84% the kind of learning that you do will look more 00:23:57.370 --> 00:23:59.020 align:middle line:84% like the learning around your hobbies 00:23:59.020 --> 00:24:01.510 align:middle line:84% than it does look like the learning in your classes. 00:24:01.510 --> 00:24:03.430 align:middle line:84% In the next couple of years, some of you 00:24:03.430 --> 00:24:06.055 align:middle line:84% will keep taking classes for a long, long time, but most of you 00:24:06.055 --> 00:24:08.510 align:middle line:84% will probably stop, or take them only infrequently. 00:24:08.510 --> 00:24:11.380 align:middle line:84% You will probably, however, continue 00:24:11.380 --> 00:24:13.945 align:middle line:84% to participate in these online learning communities. 00:24:13.945 --> 00:24:15.820 align:middle line:84% To me, it raises really interesting questions 00:24:15.820 --> 00:24:19.840 align:middle line:84% like, what responsibility does a school have 00:24:19.840 --> 00:24:24.810 align:middle line:84% for helping people become really good at learning cooking 00:24:24.810 --> 00:24:27.130 align:middle line:84% through playing with recipes the way Dana described, 00:24:27.130 --> 00:24:30.870 align:middle line:84% or learning photography through online forums, or music 00:24:30.870 --> 00:24:33.150 align:middle line:84% through online videos, in the way 00:24:33.150 --> 00:24:35.340 align:middle line:90% that Jaren and Omar describe? 00:24:35.340 --> 00:24:39.780 align:middle line:84% What would a K-12 education look like if someone left school 00:24:39.780 --> 00:24:42.030 align:middle line:84% and they were like, I'm totally prepared 00:24:42.030 --> 00:24:43.568 align:middle line:84% to teach myself stuff by engaging 00:24:43.568 --> 00:24:46.110 align:middle line:84% these online communities because I've had a bunch of practice 00:24:46.110 --> 00:24:47.350 align:middle line:90% and those sorts of things? 00:24:47.350 --> 00:24:49.920 align:middle line:84% What would a college education look 00:24:49.920 --> 00:24:51.100 align:middle line:90% like if it was good at that? 00:24:51.100 --> 00:24:53.600 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: I feel like that's like such an interesting point, 00:24:53.600 --> 00:24:56.820 align:middle line:84% because I think back to a conversation I had with my mom, 00:24:56.820 --> 00:25:00.840 align:middle line:84% where she grew up and was out of college-- or out of high school 00:25:00.840 --> 00:25:04.530 align:middle line:84% right before the really dawn of computer classes in high school 00:25:04.530 --> 00:25:05.340 align:middle line:90% and middle school. 00:25:05.340 --> 00:25:09.070 align:middle line:84% And in middle school, so rudimentary to us, 00:25:09.070 --> 00:25:10.770 align:middle line:84% we learn how to use an Excel sheet 00:25:10.770 --> 00:25:14.370 align:middle line:84% and just learn how to Google things and a lot of just 00:25:14.370 --> 00:25:18.750 align:middle line:84% the super basic skills, like how to type on a computer keyboard 00:25:18.750 --> 00:25:20.230 align:middle line:90% that she doesn't know how to do. 00:25:20.230 --> 00:25:22.080 align:middle line:84% And it almost seems like the next generation 00:25:22.080 --> 00:25:24.560 align:middle line:84% will leave computer classes knowing 00:25:24.560 --> 00:25:25.920 align:middle line:90% how to navigate these sites. 00:25:25.920 --> 00:25:29.450 align:middle line:84% And then all the stuff that I had to learn on my own, 00:25:29.450 --> 00:25:32.130 align:middle line:84% maybe I'm asking my kids, where did you learn that? 00:25:32.130 --> 00:25:33.998 align:middle line:84% And they're just like, in school. 00:25:33.998 --> 00:25:35.540 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: There was a phrase that 00:25:35.540 --> 00:25:37.050 align:middle line:90% was used for a number of years. 00:25:37.050 --> 00:25:39.500 align:middle line:90% It was called "digital native." 00:25:39.500 --> 00:25:42.920 align:middle line:84% Maybe a more common phrase that you'll hear probably in the next 00:25:42.920 --> 00:25:44.840 align:middle line:84% few years will be something like "AI native." 00:25:44.840 --> 00:25:46.340 align:middle line:84% The idea that, what's the difference 00:25:46.340 --> 00:25:48.440 align:middle line:84% between having to learn something 00:25:48.440 --> 00:25:53.300 align:middle line:84% by having it come into your life versus having it be something 00:25:53.300 --> 00:25:55.070 align:middle line:84% that you grow up with all the time. 00:25:55.070 --> 00:25:56.820 align:middle line:84% There's actually a bunch of good evidence, 00:25:56.820 --> 00:25:59.060 align:middle line:84% in fact, that digital natives, that young people are actually 00:25:59.060 --> 00:26:01.602 align:middle line:84% not that much better at using technology, especially learning 00:26:01.602 --> 00:26:03.590 align:middle line:90% things, than older folks. 00:26:03.590 --> 00:26:05.090 align:middle line:84% Young people in schools are usually 00:26:05.090 --> 00:26:06.727 align:middle line:84% pretty good at doing certain kinds 00:26:06.727 --> 00:26:08.810 align:middle line:84% of technology-mediated things, but the things that 00:26:08.810 --> 00:26:10.643 align:middle line:84% are most helpful for learning, they're often 00:26:10.643 --> 00:26:12.920 align:middle line:90% no better at than anybody else. 00:26:12.920 --> 00:26:14.880 align:middle line:84% Although I've always liked the idea-- 00:26:14.880 --> 00:26:16.880 align:middle line:84% one of the things that comes along with the idea 00:26:16.880 --> 00:26:18.873 align:middle line:84% of immigration of digital natives-- 00:26:18.873 --> 00:26:20.540 align:middle line:84% digital immigrants and digital natives-- 00:26:20.540 --> 00:26:24.218 align:middle line:84% is that second-generation immigrants are always 00:26:24.218 --> 00:26:26.010 align:middle line:84% taking on new responsibilities for teaching 00:26:26.010 --> 00:26:28.090 align:middle line:84% their first-generation parents about things. 00:26:28.090 --> 00:26:30.967 align:middle line:84% You grow up in a country and you learn the language, 00:26:30.967 --> 00:26:33.300 align:middle line:84% you learn their culture, you learn other kinds of things 00:26:33.300 --> 00:26:35.008 align:middle line:84% that you have to explain to your parents. 00:26:35.008 --> 00:26:37.230 align:middle line:84% So there's something kind of nice about that metaphor 00:26:37.230 --> 00:26:38.145 align:middle line:90% carrying over. 00:26:38.145 --> 00:26:39.270 align:middle line:90% Were you going to say more? 00:26:39.270 --> 00:26:41.687 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: Something that I know the state of Massachusetts 00:26:41.687 --> 00:26:43.350 align:middle line:90% is doing is-- 00:26:43.350 --> 00:26:45.540 align:middle line:84% I don't know if I completely agree with it-- 00:26:45.540 --> 00:26:48.820 align:middle line:84% blending computer science and computer literacy together. 00:26:48.820 --> 00:26:51.510 align:middle line:84% I do think that teaching computer literacy is 00:26:51.510 --> 00:26:53.430 align:middle line:90% of utmost importance. 00:26:53.430 --> 00:26:59.430 align:middle line:84% I credit a lot of my computer literacy to my seventh grade-- 00:26:59.430 --> 00:27:03.060 align:middle line:84% or seventh and eighth grade technology teacher. 00:27:03.060 --> 00:27:06.377 align:middle line:84% The LinkedIn I use now was created back in seventh grade, 00:27:06.377 --> 00:27:07.960 align:middle line:84% and I still use the very same account. 00:27:07.960 --> 00:27:09.990 align:middle line:90% And he was the one who got me-- 00:27:09.990 --> 00:27:12.350 align:middle line:84% I think I mentioned the typing lessons 00:27:12.350 --> 00:27:13.600 align:middle line:90% at the beginning of the class. 00:27:13.600 --> 00:27:15.270 align:middle line:84% That's where I learned how to type. 00:27:15.270 --> 00:27:17.710 align:middle line:84% That's where I learned how to create a portfolio, 00:27:17.710 --> 00:27:22.210 align:middle line:84% create an online website, do individual kind of research, 00:27:22.210 --> 00:27:23.960 align:middle line:84% and create a project on something that I'm 00:27:23.960 --> 00:27:25.340 align:middle line:90% interested about. 00:27:25.340 --> 00:27:28.220 align:middle line:84% And I think creating projects on something that 00:27:28.220 --> 00:27:33.668 align:middle line:84% is personal to someone within a K through 12 lesson 00:27:33.668 --> 00:27:35.210 align:middle line:84% is really important for teaching them 00:27:35.210 --> 00:27:38.720 align:middle line:84% how to conduct research, take notes, and come up 00:27:38.720 --> 00:27:42.390 align:middle line:84% with conclusions on what they got up and looked for online. 00:27:42.390 --> 00:27:44.780 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: And a constant challenge educators have is, 00:27:44.780 --> 00:27:48.410 align:middle line:84% what new things are actually worth investing 00:27:48.410 --> 00:27:49.920 align:middle line:84% additional discretionary time in? 00:27:49.920 --> 00:27:52.380 align:middle line:84% I mean, there were plenty of folks 10 years ago who said, 00:27:52.380 --> 00:27:54.842 align:middle line:84% man, it's incredibly important-- every high schooler 00:27:54.842 --> 00:27:55.800 align:middle line:90% should complete a MOOC. 00:27:55.800 --> 00:27:58.190 align:middle line:84% MOOCs are going to be absolutely central to how people learn 00:27:58.190 --> 00:27:59.700 align:middle line:84% and finish higher education in the future. 00:27:59.700 --> 00:28:02.158 align:middle line:84% If you can't do a MOOC, you're really going to be left out. 00:28:02.158 --> 00:28:03.950 align:middle line:84% It's like, well, maybe not so much. 00:28:03.950 --> 00:28:05.920 align:middle line:84% A LinkedIn profile, however, many years later, 00:28:05.920 --> 00:28:07.837 align:middle line:84% still seems like a pretty handy thing to have. 00:28:07.837 --> 00:28:10.760 align:middle line:84% There was no reason, 10 years ago, that you-- 00:28:10.760 --> 00:28:12.260 align:middle line:84% it's very easy to imagine a world 00:28:12.260 --> 00:28:14.838 align:middle line:84% where LinkedIn got replaced by something else entirely 00:28:14.838 --> 00:28:16.130 align:middle line:90% and MOOCs were super important. 00:28:16.130 --> 00:28:18.400 align:middle line:84% In 2013, the success paths of those things 00:28:18.400 --> 00:28:20.770 align:middle line:90% were not at all predictable. 00:28:20.770 --> 00:28:22.550 align:middle line:84% Educators were super anxious about-- 00:28:22.550 --> 00:28:23.270 align:middle line:90% I just gave it-- 00:28:23.270 --> 00:28:24.350 align:middle line:84% Erin came to this conference with me. 00:28:24.350 --> 00:28:26.860 align:middle line:84% I gave a talk to a bunch of educators about AI and education 00:28:26.860 --> 00:28:27.940 align:middle line:90% on Monday. 00:28:27.940 --> 00:28:30.520 align:middle line:84% And there's a ton of anxiety about, 00:28:30.520 --> 00:28:31.970 align:middle line:90% how important are these things? 00:28:31.970 --> 00:28:33.020 align:middle line:90% What do we not need? 00:28:33.020 --> 00:28:34.895 align:middle line:84% Does it make sense to teach kids the same way 00:28:34.895 --> 00:28:36.700 align:middle line:84% to search anymore if AI agents are just 00:28:36.700 --> 00:28:37.970 align:middle line:84% going to answer our questions for us, 00:28:37.970 --> 00:28:40.470 align:middle line:84% or is it more important to be able to do that because the AI 00:28:40.470 --> 00:28:42.550 align:middle line:84% agents are going to say nonsense to us? 00:28:42.550 --> 00:28:43.820 align:middle line:90% All these kinds of things. 00:28:43.820 --> 00:28:44.457 align:middle line:90% Yeah, Ty? 00:28:44.457 --> 00:28:45.290 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: Oh, sorry. 00:28:45.290 --> 00:28:47.920 align:middle line:84% In that regard, do you consider AI 00:28:47.920 --> 00:28:50.595 align:middle line:84% a form of peer learning because it's 00:28:50.595 --> 00:28:51.970 align:middle line:84% been trained on peer communities, 00:28:51.970 --> 00:28:53.530 align:middle line:84% like Stack Overflow and all these other things? 00:28:53.530 --> 00:28:54.988 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: I love that question. 00:28:54.988 --> 00:28:57.520 align:middle line:90% So my first thing about AI-- 00:28:57.520 --> 00:29:00.492 align:middle line:84% I was giving a talk with Jim Waldo, 00:29:00.492 --> 00:29:02.450 align:middle line:84% who was the chief technical officer at Harvard. 00:29:02.450 --> 00:29:05.800 align:middle line:84% He's a neat guy because he got a PhD in philosophy 00:29:05.800 --> 00:29:08.480 align:middle line:84% about 40 years ago, then went and worked at Oracle, 00:29:08.480 --> 00:29:09.500 align:middle line:90% helped write Java. 00:29:09.500 --> 00:29:10.690 align:middle line:84% If you have an Android phone, you're probably 00:29:10.690 --> 00:29:12.020 align:middle line:90% running his code on it. 00:29:12.020 --> 00:29:13.840 align:middle line:90% And then came back. 00:29:13.840 --> 00:29:16.490 align:middle line:84% And now he does policy stuff, and he's a philosopher again. 00:29:16.490 --> 00:29:20.700 align:middle line:84% But he's like, AI is what we call computing technologies that 00:29:20.700 --> 00:29:23.100 align:middle line:84% are new and we don't understand very well. 00:29:23.100 --> 00:29:26.130 align:middle line:84% And 10 years from now, they won't be called AI anymore. 00:29:26.130 --> 00:29:30.970 align:middle line:84% And so are generative pre-trained transformers 00:29:30.970 --> 00:29:32.200 align:middle line:90% peer communication? 00:29:32.200 --> 00:29:35.310 align:middle line:90% Well, maybe. 00:29:35.310 --> 00:29:39.090 align:middle line:84% What do I think a peer-guided network is? 00:29:39.090 --> 00:29:42.360 align:middle line:84% A learner enters a network with a wide range 00:29:42.360 --> 00:29:44.610 align:middle line:84% of learning resources that are generated 00:29:44.610 --> 00:29:47.730 align:middle line:90% by previously all human agents. 00:29:47.730 --> 00:29:50.760 align:middle line:84% Could a generative pre-trained transformer 00:29:50.760 --> 00:29:53.380 align:middle line:84% generate a useful learning sequence? 00:29:53.380 --> 00:29:56.410 align:middle line:90% Seems plausible. 00:29:56.410 --> 00:29:59.010 align:middle line:90% I remain not entirely convinced. 00:29:59.010 --> 00:30:03.280 align:middle line:84% Actually, somebody came up to me and was like, 00:30:03.280 --> 00:30:05.550 align:middle line:84% we have a startup where we're creating online classes 00:30:05.550 --> 00:30:07.600 align:middle line:90% by having AI create the classes. 00:30:07.600 --> 00:30:10.620 align:middle line:84% And I was like, that just sounds like a terrible idea, in part 00:30:10.620 --> 00:30:13.030 align:middle line:84% because there's just such a huge surfeit of classes. 00:30:13.030 --> 00:30:14.070 align:middle line:84% There's so many things out there, 00:30:14.070 --> 00:30:15.653 align:middle line:84% and they're really not, unfortunately, 00:30:15.653 --> 00:30:17.180 align:middle line:90% that expensive to develop. 00:30:17.180 --> 00:30:21.140 align:middle line:84% Why do you need machines to do them? 00:30:21.140 --> 00:30:26.400 align:middle line:84% I have a colleague, Carolyn Rosé, 00:30:26.400 --> 00:30:30.650 align:middle line:84% who worked with chatbots for decades. 00:30:30.650 --> 00:30:34.370 align:middle line:84% And she actually has convinced me 00:30:34.370 --> 00:30:37.910 align:middle line:84% to be very skeptical of interactions of individuals 00:30:37.910 --> 00:30:39.180 align:middle line:90% with chatbots. 00:30:39.180 --> 00:30:40.070 align:middle line:90% I don't know. 00:30:40.070 --> 00:30:42.403 align:middle line:84% How many of you in the last week spent more than an hour 00:30:42.403 --> 00:30:43.940 align:middle line:90% talking to a chatbot? 00:30:43.940 --> 00:30:44.720 align:middle line:90% Zero. 00:30:44.720 --> 00:30:46.820 align:middle line:90% Maybe one. 00:30:46.820 --> 00:30:48.770 align:middle line:84% I just don't think people like it that much. 00:30:48.770 --> 00:30:51.680 align:middle line:84% She really thought that where they could be powerful 00:30:51.680 --> 00:30:54.230 align:middle line:84% is jumping in in the conversations between two 00:30:54.230 --> 00:30:57.270 align:middle line:84% people, that you just have peers talking to each other. 00:30:57.270 --> 00:30:58.700 align:middle line:84% So you're on this discussion forum 00:30:58.700 --> 00:31:01.117 align:middle line:84% and you're going back and forth or other things like that, 00:31:01.117 --> 00:31:02.840 align:middle line:84% and then a bot comes in and helps you 00:31:02.840 --> 00:31:04.245 align:middle line:90% ask an interesting question. 00:31:04.245 --> 00:31:06.620 align:middle line:84% Hey, look, somebody over here has a different perspective 00:31:06.620 --> 00:31:07.020 align:middle line:90% on that. 00:31:07.020 --> 00:31:07.890 align:middle line:90% Let me connect you to that. 00:31:07.890 --> 00:31:09.830 align:middle line:84% And so you can talk and things like that. 00:31:09.830 --> 00:31:13.600 align:middle line:84% But yeah, I think it totally seems plausible 00:31:13.600 --> 00:31:17.535 align:middle line:84% that a peer-guided learning environment could include 00:31:17.535 --> 00:31:19.660 align:middle line:84% artificial agents that are doing things that humans 00:31:19.660 --> 00:31:22.060 align:middle line:90% had previously been doing. 00:31:22.060 --> 00:31:25.070 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: Yeah, I guess, to both your points of AI interaction, 00:31:25.070 --> 00:31:30.770 align:middle line:84% I would say an interesting aspect of that, 00:31:30.770 --> 00:31:33.040 align:middle line:84% especially in terms of what can be 00:31:33.040 --> 00:31:35.300 align:middle line:84% a credible source for learning and stuff like that. 00:31:35.300 --> 00:31:39.980 align:middle line:84% So I think, in California, or at least the part of California 00:31:39.980 --> 00:31:41.980 align:middle line:84% I was in for a while, we did have, 00:31:41.980 --> 00:31:45.400 align:middle line:84% in middle school, a week-long program 00:31:45.400 --> 00:31:49.480 align:middle line:84% that every kid had to do that was like, oh, you're 13. 00:31:49.480 --> 00:31:50.900 align:middle line:90% Here, make an email. 00:31:50.900 --> 00:31:54.040 align:middle line:90% And here's how you Google stuff. 00:31:54.040 --> 00:31:58.180 align:middle line:84% And recently, with the new Google 00:31:58.180 --> 00:32:00.250 align:middle line:84% AI feature that kind of summarizes 00:32:00.250 --> 00:32:03.880 align:middle line:84% answers for you now, I was thinking about, 00:32:03.880 --> 00:32:08.510 align:middle line:84% how does that change those levels of instructions? 00:32:08.510 --> 00:32:11.200 align:middle line:84% Because sometimes I look up things, and I see the summary, 00:32:11.200 --> 00:32:13.380 align:middle line:84% and I'm like, I don't know what the answer is, 00:32:13.380 --> 00:32:14.720 align:middle line:90% but I know it's not that. 00:32:14.720 --> 00:32:16.340 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHTER] 00:32:16.340 --> 00:32:18.450 align:middle line:90% And I go deeper. 00:32:18.450 --> 00:32:21.810 align:middle line:84% But let's say, if I'm a middle schooler and it's like, 00:32:21.810 --> 00:32:24.170 align:middle line:84% well, I don't learn this, or I'm a high schooler 00:32:24.170 --> 00:32:25.770 align:middle line:84% that took that class in middle school. 00:32:25.770 --> 00:32:28.080 align:middle line:84% And it's like, well, now I'm not sure. 00:32:28.080 --> 00:32:30.818 align:middle line:90% Or I take Bard's word for good. 00:32:30.818 --> 00:32:31.610 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: Yeah. 00:32:31.610 --> 00:32:32.110 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:32:32.110 --> 00:32:35.030 align:middle line:84% No, a huge problem with GPT-generated text 00:32:35.030 --> 00:32:37.400 align:middle line:84% is that it's probably much more useful for experts 00:32:37.400 --> 00:32:38.780 align:middle line:90% than for novices. 00:32:38.780 --> 00:32:43.248 align:middle line:84% So if you ask a GPT to make eight things and two of them 00:32:43.248 --> 00:32:45.540 align:middle line:84% are cool and six of them are nonsense, or the opposite, 00:32:45.540 --> 00:32:46.970 align:middle line:84% an expert can tell the difference 00:32:46.970 --> 00:32:49.050 align:middle line:84% and be like, oh, that was an idea I didn't have before. 00:32:49.050 --> 00:32:49.980 align:middle line:90% But a novice can't. 00:32:49.980 --> 00:32:52.050 align:middle line:84% A novice just looks and be like, OK, these are eight ideas. 00:32:52.050 --> 00:32:53.690 align:middle line:84% They all seem plausible and they're confidently 00:32:53.690 --> 00:32:54.780 align:middle line:90% stated and things like that. 00:32:54.780 --> 00:32:56.210 align:middle line:84% It's a huge problem that educators 00:32:56.210 --> 00:32:59.770 align:middle line:84% are going to have to wrestle with in the years ahead. 00:32:59.770 --> 00:33:02.620 align:middle line:90% 00:33:02.620 --> 00:33:06.740 align:middle line:84% The kind of class that you're describing, 00:33:06.740 --> 00:33:09.960 align:middle line:84% if it were to be taught 10 years ago, 00:33:09.960 --> 00:33:13.020 align:middle line:84% a big thing that educators were thinking about at the time 00:33:13.020 --> 00:33:17.190 align:middle line:84% was, how are people going to navigate a social web? 00:33:17.190 --> 00:33:19.865 align:middle line:84% So when the web was first developed-- 00:33:19.865 --> 00:33:21.490 align:middle line:84% we'll get into this a little bit more-- 00:33:21.490 --> 00:33:24.000 align:middle line:84% it was pretty hard for people to contribute to it. 00:33:24.000 --> 00:33:25.720 align:middle line:84% You had to know a little bit about FTP, 00:33:25.720 --> 00:33:27.527 align:middle line:84% you had to know a little bit about HTML, 00:33:27.527 --> 00:33:28.860 align:middle line:90% a couple other things like that. 00:33:28.860 --> 00:33:30.540 align:middle line:84% They weren't super hard, but there 00:33:30.540 --> 00:33:32.790 align:middle line:84% was a relatively small portion of the population that 00:33:32.790 --> 00:33:35.070 align:middle line:90% added content to the internet. 00:33:35.070 --> 00:33:37.170 align:middle line:84% And there was a suite of technologies 00:33:37.170 --> 00:33:40.830 align:middle line:84% that got bundled and called Web 2.0, which said, OK, we're 00:33:40.830 --> 00:33:44.110 align:middle line:84% going to make it much easier for anybody to type things online. 00:33:44.110 --> 00:33:45.400 align:middle line:90% You can all start a blog. 00:33:45.400 --> 00:33:46.810 align:middle line:90% You can all start a microblog. 00:33:46.810 --> 00:33:48.730 align:middle line:84% You can all make a simple website. 00:33:48.730 --> 00:33:51.420 align:middle line:84% You don't have to know how to code to do any of these things. 00:33:51.420 --> 00:33:53.880 align:middle line:84% We're going to use user interfaces 00:33:53.880 --> 00:33:56.760 align:middle line:84% to take away all that programming expertise that's 00:33:56.760 --> 00:33:57.520 align:middle line:90% necessary. 00:33:57.520 --> 00:34:02.100 align:middle line:84% And so people thought, wow, I bet our lives 00:34:02.100 --> 00:34:03.780 align:middle line:90% and young people's lives-- 00:34:03.780 --> 00:34:06.707 align:middle line:84% if you're teaching 11-year-olds, 12-year-olds in 2013, 00:34:06.707 --> 00:34:09.290 align:middle line:84% you're like, man, a major thing they're going to have to do is 00:34:09.290 --> 00:34:10.650 align:middle line:84% how to connect and network with each other. 00:34:10.650 --> 00:34:12.400 align:middle line:84% We have to have them create their LinkedIn 00:34:12.400 --> 00:34:15.090 align:middle line:84% page so that they know how to social network with each other. 00:34:15.090 --> 00:34:18.025 align:middle line:84% We have to have them participate in online dialogues. 00:34:18.025 --> 00:34:19.400 align:middle line:84% We have to have them think about, 00:34:19.400 --> 00:34:22.350 align:middle line:84% what are responsible ways of representing themselves? 00:34:22.350 --> 00:34:25.370 align:middle line:84% People talk a lot about their digital footprint 00:34:25.370 --> 00:34:28.429 align:middle line:84% and other kinds of things like that. 00:34:28.429 --> 00:34:34.130 align:middle line:84% Today, a 13-year-old is entering a web environment in which there 00:34:34.130 --> 00:34:37.880 align:middle line:84% are lots of parts of social media which are collapsing. 00:34:37.880 --> 00:34:40.676 align:middle line:90% 00:34:40.676 --> 00:34:42.710 align:middle line:84% Just as an example, actually, I went 00:34:42.710 --> 00:34:45.480 align:middle line:84% to the guy who ran this conference on Monday, 00:34:45.480 --> 00:34:47.639 align:middle line:90% and it was kind of interesting. 00:34:47.639 --> 00:34:50.760 align:middle line:84% So usually this conference get 100 or 150 people show up. 00:34:50.760 --> 00:34:51.590 align:middle line:90% It was about AI. 00:34:51.590 --> 00:34:54.980 align:middle line:84% They had 240 people show up, and 70 folks were on the waitlist. 00:34:54.980 --> 00:34:56.833 align:middle line:84% Tons and tons of interest from educators. 00:34:56.833 --> 00:34:59.250 align:middle line:84% And I went to the guy who runs it, Tom Driscoll, and says, 00:34:59.250 --> 00:35:00.780 align:middle line:84% what do you think these teachers are interested in? 00:35:00.780 --> 00:35:02.550 align:middle line:84% What are you-- what do they want to know? 00:35:02.550 --> 00:35:03.590 align:middle line:90% Why are they here? 00:35:03.590 --> 00:35:05.100 align:middle line:90% And he's like, you know what? 00:35:05.100 --> 00:35:06.140 align:middle line:90% I don't know. 00:35:06.140 --> 00:35:09.620 align:middle line:84% 10 years ago, they would have had blogs. 00:35:09.620 --> 00:35:11.595 align:middle line:84% They would have participated in forums. 00:35:11.595 --> 00:35:13.220 align:middle line:84% They would have joined Facebook groups. 00:35:13.220 --> 00:35:17.620 align:middle line:84% They would have-- there were many, many more ways 00:35:17.620 --> 00:35:20.740 align:middle line:84% that educators were proactively contributing 00:35:20.740 --> 00:35:22.010 align:middle line:90% their ideas to the web. 00:35:22.010 --> 00:35:23.060 align:middle line:90% Maybe not all of them. 00:35:23.060 --> 00:35:24.898 align:middle line:84% Maybe it was 10% of them or 20% of them, 00:35:24.898 --> 00:35:26.440 align:middle line:84% but there was enough of them that you 00:35:26.440 --> 00:35:30.250 align:middle line:84% could get the pulse of a whole community, which 00:35:30.250 --> 00:35:33.670 align:middle line:84% he felt like, and I agree, you really can't do anymore. 00:35:33.670 --> 00:35:37.570 align:middle line:84% Some of that is that there was a moment 00:35:37.570 --> 00:35:40.660 align:middle line:84% in Web 2.0 in which people believed 00:35:40.660 --> 00:35:42.790 align:middle line:84% that the infrastructure of the web 00:35:42.790 --> 00:35:46.930 align:middle line:84% might be really quite open and quite owned 00:35:46.930 --> 00:35:49.300 align:middle line:84% or controlled by individual people, 00:35:49.300 --> 00:35:51.820 align:middle line:84% that there could be a world where people create 00:35:51.820 --> 00:35:54.140 align:middle line:84% their own websites, they create their own blogs, 00:35:54.140 --> 00:35:56.830 align:middle line:84% they host their own accounts, and things like that. 00:35:56.830 --> 00:36:00.100 align:middle line:84% And I don't know when some of these things-- starting 00:36:00.100 --> 00:36:03.460 align:middle line:84% around 2015, 2016, people started 00:36:03.460 --> 00:36:08.700 align:middle line:84% describing The Web We Lost, a kind of moment in which 00:36:08.700 --> 00:36:12.030 align:middle line:90% social media took a turn. 00:36:12.030 --> 00:36:14.400 align:middle line:84% So these are the kinds of things that, I 00:36:14.400 --> 00:36:17.230 align:middle line:84% don't know, I was playing around with in 2004, 2007. 00:36:17.230 --> 00:36:19.347 align:middle line:84% Any of you have a LiveJournal blog? 00:36:19.347 --> 00:36:21.180 align:middle line:84% That was one of the earliest blogging sites, 00:36:21.180 --> 00:36:23.263 align:middle line:84% that people create their own space and hosting it. 00:36:23.263 --> 00:36:26.427 align:middle line:84% This was a wordpress.com blog of my wife and I, 00:36:26.427 --> 00:36:29.010 align:middle line:84% writing little stories about us going on adventures and things 00:36:29.010 --> 00:36:32.400 align:middle line:84% like that, posting pictures, hosting it ourselves. 00:36:32.400 --> 00:36:36.540 align:middle line:84% And essentially, Facebook came and demolished all this 00:36:36.540 --> 00:36:38.700 align:middle line:90% and said, you know what? 00:36:38.700 --> 00:36:40.870 align:middle line:84% You don't need to host your own blog. 00:36:40.870 --> 00:36:45.630 align:middle line:84% You don't need to figure out an FTP server 00:36:45.630 --> 00:36:48.270 align:middle line:84% to upload your own pictures or use a picture interface. 00:36:48.270 --> 00:36:50.250 align:middle line:84% We're going to create an interface. 00:36:50.250 --> 00:36:52.740 align:middle line:84% People participate in a lot of the same kind of practices 00:36:52.740 --> 00:36:55.200 align:middle line:84% on Facebook, of writing little stories on the trips they do 00:36:55.200 --> 00:36:56.908 align:middle line:84% and posting pictures and stuff like that. 00:36:56.908 --> 00:37:01.560 align:middle line:84% But all of a sudden, it was all controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. 00:37:01.560 --> 00:37:03.648 align:middle line:84% This was a quote from David Weinberger. 00:37:03.648 --> 00:37:05.440 align:middle line:84% "In many ways, Facebook fulfilled the dream 00:37:05.440 --> 00:37:06.140 align:middle line:90% of blogging." 00:37:06.140 --> 00:37:07.940 align:middle line:90% But not exactly. 00:37:07.940 --> 00:37:10.930 align:middle line:84% Everybody was online, but they weren't in spaces 00:37:10.930 --> 00:37:15.700 align:middle line:84% that they owned, had control over, had some familiarity with. 00:37:15.700 --> 00:37:19.330 align:middle line:84% And then-- we'll talk about some of this as it goes along-- 00:37:19.330 --> 00:37:23.740 align:middle line:84% I think there was a moment in which participation 00:37:23.740 --> 00:37:29.500 align:middle line:84% in a broad online life felt much less toxic and draining 00:37:29.500 --> 00:37:34.210 align:middle line:84% and vulnerability-inspiring as it does right now. 00:37:34.210 --> 00:37:38.680 align:middle line:84% I mean, if you're a teacher who's 00:37:38.680 --> 00:37:40.360 align:middle line:84% working in a state which has recently 00:37:40.360 --> 00:37:43.718 align:middle line:84% passed a divisive concepts law or other things like that, 00:37:43.718 --> 00:37:45.760 align:middle line:84% regulating the kinds of topics you can talk about 00:37:45.760 --> 00:37:50.080 align:middle line:84% and things like that, all of that has a chilling effect. 00:37:50.080 --> 00:37:54.683 align:middle line:84% I mean, not to mention just the ways in which the social media 00:37:54.683 --> 00:37:57.100 align:middle line:84% services, Facebook, Twitter, other kinds of things we use, 00:37:57.100 --> 00:38:01.990 align:middle line:84% have degraded in their conversations over time. 00:38:01.990 --> 00:38:04.050 align:middle line:84% This is what David Weinberger said. 00:38:04.050 --> 00:38:08.120 align:middle line:90% "The blogosphere did not scale." 00:38:08.120 --> 00:38:11.140 align:middle line:84% Some people created their own blogs, but not everyone. 00:38:11.140 --> 00:38:14.117 align:middle line:84% And then Facebook came in, and many people who created blogs 00:38:14.117 --> 00:38:15.700 align:middle line:84% were like, I'll just post to Facebook. 00:38:15.700 --> 00:38:17.242 align:middle line:84% A lot of those people have moved over 00:38:17.242 --> 00:38:20.040 align:middle line:84% to Substack now or other kinds of things like that, but systems 00:38:20.040 --> 00:38:22.440 align:middle line:90% that they don't control. 00:38:22.440 --> 00:38:26.280 align:middle line:84% There is, I think, a parallel to that story that 00:38:26.280 --> 00:38:29.010 align:middle line:90% happened in higher education. 00:38:29.010 --> 00:38:34.200 align:middle line:84% So in the early days, when the web was first made available 00:38:34.200 --> 00:38:38.050 align:middle line:84% broadly to schools, which also happens to overlap with my life. 00:38:38.050 --> 00:38:42.030 align:middle line:84% So I think, in 1993, Dartmouth College is the first college 00:38:42.030 --> 00:38:46.060 align:middle line:84% to give every incoming student an email address. 00:38:46.060 --> 00:38:50.880 align:middle line:84% I think, in 1994, very quickly, many, many other colleges 00:38:50.880 --> 00:38:51.540 align:middle line:90% had done that. 00:38:51.540 --> 00:38:53.740 align:middle line:84% By the time I graduated high school, 00:38:53.740 --> 00:38:56.760 align:middle line:84% but certainly by the time I was into college in 1996, 00:38:56.760 --> 00:38:57.970 align:middle line:90% I had an email address. 00:38:57.970 --> 00:38:59.928 align:middle line:84% Everybody else would have had an email address. 00:38:59.928 --> 00:39:02.630 align:middle line:84% That would have been pretty universal and standard. 00:39:02.630 --> 00:39:07.040 align:middle line:84% But this is what university web pages looked like at the time. 00:39:07.040 --> 00:39:09.330 align:middle line:84% MIT still has some of these kinds of things. 00:39:09.330 --> 00:39:11.370 align:middle line:84% Has anybody ever been to somebody's Tilde Space? 00:39:11.370 --> 00:39:16.530 align:middle line:84% www.mit.edu/ tildejreich or something like that. 00:39:16.530 --> 00:39:18.240 align:middle line:90% Who do you-- 00:39:18.240 --> 00:39:18.990 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: Oh, man. 00:39:18.990 --> 00:39:20.280 align:middle line:90% The 18.06 professor. 00:39:20.280 --> 00:39:22.314 align:middle line:90% What's his name? 00:39:22.314 --> 00:39:24.380 align:middle line:90% I keep forgetting. 00:39:24.380 --> 00:39:25.438 align:middle line:90% The one who just retired. 00:39:25.438 --> 00:39:26.480 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: Gilbert Strang? 00:39:26.480 --> 00:39:27.060 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: Gil Strang? 00:39:27.060 --> 00:39:27.320 align:middle line:90% Good. 00:39:27.320 --> 00:39:27.780 align:middle line:90% Perfect. 00:39:27.780 --> 00:39:28.280 align:middle line:90% Great. 00:39:28.280 --> 00:39:31.910 align:middle line:84% Others that people can think of who have these things? 00:39:31.910 --> 00:39:34.178 align:middle line:84% So some things that you'll notice about the-- well, 00:39:34.178 --> 00:39:34.720 align:middle line:90% I don't know. 00:39:34.720 --> 00:39:35.990 align:middle line:84% What are you-- just looking at these pictures, what do 00:39:35.990 --> 00:39:37.020 align:middle line:90% you notice about these things? 00:39:37.020 --> 00:39:38.190 align:middle line:90% What strikes you about them? 00:39:38.190 --> 00:39:40.732 align:middle line:84% There were some giggles before, which I think is appropriate. 00:39:40.732 --> 00:39:44.330 align:middle line:90% 00:39:44.330 --> 00:39:47.000 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: Everything is Times New Roman. 00:39:47.000 --> 00:39:47.920 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: OK. 00:39:47.920 --> 00:39:50.030 align:middle line:90% So not a lot of font diversity. 00:39:50.030 --> 00:39:50.845 align:middle line:90% What else? 00:39:50.845 --> 00:39:54.500 align:middle line:90% 00:39:54.500 --> 00:39:56.180 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: There's no advertisements. 00:39:56.180 --> 00:39:57.222 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: Yeah, good. 00:39:57.222 --> 00:40:00.420 align:middle line:84% No, so these were not created with Wix or something 00:40:00.420 --> 00:40:03.895 align:middle line:84% like that, where, in exchange for making a website, 00:40:03.895 --> 00:40:05.520 align:middle line:84% you have to put a bar of advertisements 00:40:05.520 --> 00:40:06.700 align:middle line:84% at the bottom or something like that. 00:40:06.700 --> 00:40:08.500 align:middle line:84% So somebody actually made these pages. 00:40:08.500 --> 00:40:10.140 align:middle line:90% They're all personal home pages. 00:40:10.140 --> 00:40:12.750 align:middle line:90% Other things that strike you? 00:40:12.750 --> 00:40:14.470 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: The backgrounds. 00:40:14.470 --> 00:40:17.550 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: What about the backgrounds? 00:40:17.550 --> 00:40:18.780 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: It's certainly of-- 00:40:18.780 --> 00:40:19.570 align:middle line:90% I don't know. 00:40:19.570 --> 00:40:21.810 align:middle line:84% I feel like I personally associate them 00:40:21.810 --> 00:40:24.252 align:middle line:84% with a very specific time period. 00:40:24.252 --> 00:40:25.210 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: OK, good. 00:40:25.210 --> 00:40:26.627 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: Like this is naturally-- 00:40:26.627 --> 00:40:28.870 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: They have a '90s aesthetic to them? 00:40:28.870 --> 00:40:29.530 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: Yeah. 00:40:29.530 --> 00:40:32.970 align:middle line:84% I would say maybe it is partially 00:40:32.970 --> 00:40:40.110 align:middle line:84% just the quality of, let's say, a pattern or something you can 00:40:40.110 --> 00:40:42.750 align:middle line:84% put on, or now we have a lot of templates 00:40:42.750 --> 00:40:45.310 align:middle line:84% and make sure it's aesthetically consistent. 00:40:45.310 --> 00:40:47.518 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: This is pre-Canva. 00:40:47.518 --> 00:40:49.060 align:middle line:84% Kent, what were you going to observe? 00:40:49.060 --> 00:40:50.430 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: I was about to say about the templates. 00:40:50.430 --> 00:40:52.798 align:middle line:84% They're not all using the exact same template 00:40:52.798 --> 00:40:53.590 align:middle line:90% and similar format. 00:40:53.590 --> 00:40:56.190 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: They're not all using the exact same template 00:40:56.190 --> 00:40:57.400 align:middle line:90% and similar formatting. 00:40:57.400 --> 00:41:00.590 align:middle line:84% I think that that is actually quite important. 00:41:00.590 --> 00:41:03.320 align:middle line:84% There are some good things that templates do, 00:41:03.320 --> 00:41:07.520 align:middle line:84% of make things looking aesthetic, 00:41:07.520 --> 00:41:09.660 align:middle line:90% but they standardize in a way. 00:41:09.660 --> 00:41:11.370 align:middle line:90% They put things in the same way. 00:41:11.370 --> 00:41:13.760 align:middle line:84% People at universities do really, really different kinds 00:41:13.760 --> 00:41:14.180 align:middle line:90% of things. 00:41:14.180 --> 00:41:15.180 align:middle line:90% That might be important. 00:41:15.180 --> 00:41:17.240 align:middle line:90% Other observations about these? 00:41:17.240 --> 00:41:19.040 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: It's very skeuomorphic. 00:41:19.040 --> 00:41:22.190 align:middle line:84% There's buttons on the bottom left, along those icons, 00:41:22.190 --> 00:41:24.647 align:middle line:90% that you don't see as often. 00:41:24.647 --> 00:41:26.480 align:middle line:84% And I want to say the background, especially 00:41:26.480 --> 00:41:31.310 align:middle line:84% the bottom left, where I think of a physical wallpaper, which 00:41:31.310 --> 00:41:32.605 align:middle line:90% is like the principal-- 00:41:32.605 --> 00:41:34.980 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: Do you want to define skeuomorphism for us? 00:41:34.980 --> 00:41:37.580 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: Skeuomorphism is like-- 00:41:37.580 --> 00:41:40.290 align:middle line:84% the most famous example is probably iOS 6, 00:41:40.290 --> 00:41:43.940 align:middle line:84% where you have all these buttons and reflections that 00:41:43.940 --> 00:41:45.420 align:middle line:90% try to mimic real life. 00:41:45.420 --> 00:41:50.070 align:middle line:84% And that's what skeuomorphism is, trying to mimic real life. 00:41:50.070 --> 00:41:52.380 align:middle line:84% And then, when we transitioned to iOS 7, 00:41:52.380 --> 00:41:54.470 align:middle line:84% you removed a lot of that dimension, 00:41:54.470 --> 00:41:57.007 align:middle line:84% and it became a lot more simplistic and symbolic. 00:41:57.007 --> 00:41:58.840 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: A lot of the early note taking 00:41:58.840 --> 00:42:02.450 align:middle line:84% apps would have a background like a yellow legal pad, 00:42:02.450 --> 00:42:05.120 align:middle line:84% or a spiral binding on the side or something like that. 00:42:05.120 --> 00:42:06.790 align:middle line:84% And you're like, brother, we could put 00:42:06.790 --> 00:42:08.380 align:middle line:90% the-- we don't need the lines. 00:42:08.380 --> 00:42:10.330 align:middle line:90% The cursor will do that for you. 00:42:10.330 --> 00:42:13.840 align:middle line:84% But people wanted to make some kind of connection 00:42:13.840 --> 00:42:15.140 align:middle line:90% between what they saw-- 00:42:15.140 --> 00:42:16.640 align:middle line:84% what they saw in the physical world, 00:42:16.640 --> 00:42:18.230 align:middle line:84% and what this new digital thing was trying to do. 00:42:18.230 --> 00:42:20.210 align:middle line:84% Skeuomorphism shows up in that book somewhere. 00:42:20.210 --> 00:42:22.043 align:middle line:84% I can't remember now where I wrote about it. 00:42:22.043 --> 00:42:23.990 align:middle line:90% But yeah. 00:42:23.990 --> 00:42:28.990 align:middle line:84% I mean, obviously, these pictures are just outstanding. 00:42:28.990 --> 00:42:36.640 align:middle line:84% Just like people had kind of a cool, idiosyncratic, 00:42:36.640 --> 00:42:39.310 align:middle line:84% personalized, kind of a pain in the butt 00:42:39.310 --> 00:42:43.210 align:middle line:84% to organize blogosphere that existed, that Facebook just 00:42:43.210 --> 00:42:46.750 align:middle line:84% came and demolished and homogenized and standardized 00:42:46.750 --> 00:42:49.960 align:middle line:84% and pulled out of the control of individual people's spaces 00:42:49.960 --> 00:42:54.310 align:middle line:84% and into this corporate space, you could say that Blackboard 00:42:54.310 --> 00:42:57.690 align:middle line:84% did something very, very similar to campus web pages, 00:42:57.690 --> 00:43:01.450 align:middle line:84% that learning management systems came along and they said, 00:43:01.450 --> 00:43:03.420 align:middle line:84% we're going to standardize it all. 00:43:03.420 --> 00:43:06.690 align:middle line:84% You don't have to create your own page anymore. 00:43:06.690 --> 00:43:08.770 align:middle line:84% Blackboard will create your own faculty page, 00:43:08.770 --> 00:43:10.890 align:middle line:90% create your own course page. 00:43:10.890 --> 00:43:13.350 align:middle line:84% And that's going to come with some kind of benefits 00:43:13.350 --> 00:43:14.260 align:middle line:90% of standardization. 00:43:14.260 --> 00:43:16.177 align:middle line:84% It's going to make it a lot easier for people. 00:43:16.177 --> 00:43:19.980 align:middle line:84% But it's also going to get rid of some 00:43:19.980 --> 00:43:23.950 align:middle line:84% of the wonderful idiosyncrasies of these things. 00:43:23.950 --> 00:43:27.990 align:middle line:84% And it's going to mean that there is a corporate entity who 00:43:27.990 --> 00:43:30.120 align:middle line:84% is not accountable-- who's accountable to their 00:43:30.120 --> 00:43:32.460 align:middle line:84% shareholders and not accountable to the same values 00:43:32.460 --> 00:43:35.460 align:middle line:84% that we might have as a university, which is deciding 00:43:35.460 --> 00:43:37.800 align:middle line:84% what those things look like, much like when we move all 00:43:37.800 --> 00:43:40.993 align:middle line:84% of our blogs onto Facebook, you're not even 00:43:40.993 --> 00:43:42.160 align:middle line:90% accountable to shareholders. 00:43:42.160 --> 00:43:45.180 align:middle line:84% You're just accountable to whatever Mark thinks people 00:43:45.180 --> 00:43:47.640 align:middle line:90% should be doing in Facebook. 00:43:47.640 --> 00:43:48.160 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:43:48.160 --> 00:43:49.590 align:middle line:84% In many ways, Blackboard fulfilled 00:43:49.590 --> 00:43:50.757 align:middle line:90% the dream of the university. 00:43:50.757 --> 00:43:51.895 align:middle line:90% Tilde Spaces did not scale. 00:43:51.895 --> 00:43:53.770 align:middle line:84% I believe the problem could have been solved. 00:43:53.770 --> 00:43:55.300 align:middle line:90% But then Blackboard happened. 00:43:55.300 --> 00:43:57.490 align:middle line:90% Why would Blackboard happen? 00:43:57.490 --> 00:44:01.750 align:middle line:84% These are the instructions for SUNY Oneonta 00:44:01.750 --> 00:44:04.830 align:middle line:84% about how you would go about creating one of your Tilde Space 00:44:04.830 --> 00:44:05.330 align:middle line:90% pages. 00:44:05.330 --> 00:44:06.950 align:middle line:90% Log in to ACAD. 00:44:06.950 --> 00:44:07.970 align:middle line:90% Create a directory. 00:44:07.970 --> 00:44:09.140 align:middle line:90% Change to this directory. 00:44:09.140 --> 00:44:11.350 align:middle line:90% Create HTML documents. 00:44:11.350 --> 00:44:12.950 align:middle line:90% HTML Developers Jump Station. 00:44:12.950 --> 00:44:16.370 align:middle line:84% Set prot equals w colon r filename x. 00:44:16.370 --> 00:44:19.460 align:middle line:84% You read about a page of this stuff and you're like, yeah, 00:44:19.460 --> 00:44:21.250 align:middle line:90% I can see why a lot of people-- 00:44:21.250 --> 00:44:24.390 align:middle line:84% why launching a Blackboard page might be fine. 00:44:24.390 --> 00:44:27.760 align:middle line:90% 00:44:27.760 --> 00:44:30.565 align:middle line:90% This is what the-- 00:44:30.565 --> 00:44:33.280 align:middle line:90% was this Blackboard? 00:44:33.280 --> 00:44:37.580 align:middle line:84% I don't remember what learning management system this was. 00:44:37.580 --> 00:44:38.990 align:middle line:90% Maybe it's Canvas. 00:44:38.990 --> 00:44:39.670 align:middle line:90% It's not Canvas. 00:44:39.670 --> 00:44:41.545 align:middle line:84% I don't know I can't remember what it is now. 00:44:41.545 --> 00:44:46.510 align:middle line:84% This is the very first version of a version of this course 00:44:46.510 --> 00:44:48.370 align:middle line:90% that I taught 10 years ago. 00:44:48.370 --> 00:44:53.490 align:middle line:84% And this is the page that the system generated for me 00:44:53.490 --> 00:44:55.240 align:middle line:90% when I first created the class. 00:44:55.240 --> 00:44:58.020 align:middle line:84% So it comes with a bunch of these sort of-- not this stuff. 00:44:58.020 --> 00:44:58.720 align:middle line:90% That I added. 00:44:58.720 --> 00:45:01.120 align:middle line:84% But Syllabus, Class Sessions, Other Resources, 00:45:01.120 --> 00:45:03.430 align:middle line:84% Assignments, Collaborate, Information, Reserves Lists, 00:45:03.430 --> 00:45:05.280 align:middle line:90% Search this Site, Lecture Video. 00:45:05.280 --> 00:45:08.580 align:middle line:84% It makes a set of assumptions about what my course is. 00:45:08.580 --> 00:45:11.910 align:middle line:84% It says, this is what the standard format of this learning 00:45:11.910 --> 00:45:13.860 align:middle line:90% experience should be. 00:45:13.860 --> 00:45:16.955 align:middle line:84% But maybe that's not at all what I want. 00:45:16.955 --> 00:45:18.330 align:middle line:84% It certainly doesn't make a lot-- 00:45:18.330 --> 00:45:21.180 align:middle line:84% if I had taught this class about-- 00:45:21.180 --> 00:45:22.750 align:middle line:90% this was in an education school. 00:45:22.750 --> 00:45:25.570 align:middle line:84% If I had made this class about education technology, 00:45:25.570 --> 00:45:28.170 align:middle line:84% about the experience of Indigenous kids 00:45:28.170 --> 00:45:31.600 align:middle line:84% learning on reservations, about, I don't know, 00:45:31.600 --> 00:45:36.760 align:middle line:84% the global education policy, intermediate statistics, 00:45:36.760 --> 00:45:38.970 align:middle line:84% it all would have been the exact same format. 00:45:38.970 --> 00:45:41.940 align:middle line:84% They would have given the same standardized creation 00:45:41.940 --> 00:45:44.170 align:middle line:90% for this, which in lots of-- 00:45:44.170 --> 00:45:45.670 align:middle line:84% it makes sense in some kind of ways, 00:45:45.670 --> 00:45:47.080 align:middle line:84% and it's bonkers and other kinds of ways. 00:45:47.080 --> 00:45:48.532 align:middle line:90% Our courses are super different. 00:45:48.532 --> 00:45:50.740 align:middle line:84% Why should all of our courses have the same template? 00:45:50.740 --> 00:45:53.900 align:middle line:84% Why should we all be subtly, invisibly squished 00:45:53.900 --> 00:45:56.600 align:middle line:84% into teaching our courses the same way 00:45:56.600 --> 00:45:59.540 align:middle line:90% by these kinds of structures? 00:45:59.540 --> 00:46:04.220 align:middle line:84% And of course, there's all kinds of physical analogs to this too. 00:46:04.220 --> 00:46:10.008 align:middle line:84% The way we design environments shapes the learning experiences 00:46:10.008 --> 00:46:11.300 align:middle line:90% that happen in the environment. 00:46:11.300 --> 00:46:13.140 align:middle line:84% I just read a beautiful sentence of this, 00:46:13.140 --> 00:46:15.020 align:middle line:90% which is something like-- 00:46:15.020 --> 00:46:18.950 align:middle line:84% it was something like, buildings have agenda for their occupants. 00:46:18.950 --> 00:46:22.350 align:middle line:84% The way that spaces are created, it doesn't tell you what to do, 00:46:22.350 --> 00:46:24.030 align:middle line:90% but it certainly guides you. 00:46:24.030 --> 00:46:26.810 align:middle line:84% You walk into a room like this and you 00:46:26.810 --> 00:46:28.460 align:middle line:84% have some thoughts about the kind 00:46:28.460 --> 00:46:30.502 align:middle line:84% of learning that's going to happen in that space. 00:46:30.502 --> 00:46:32.918 align:middle line:84% Well, you're all going to be facing in the same direction, 00:46:32.918 --> 00:46:35.540 align:middle line:84% probably not going to be talking to each other a whole lot 00:46:35.540 --> 00:46:37.205 align:middle line:90% in that space. 00:46:37.205 --> 00:46:39.080 align:middle line:84% You're going to be writing with certain kinds 00:46:39.080 --> 00:46:40.380 align:middle line:90% of physical materials. 00:46:40.380 --> 00:46:44.270 align:middle line:84% If you try to use a laptop on those square tables, 00:46:44.270 --> 00:46:45.270 align:middle line:90% you'll have a hard time. 00:46:45.270 --> 00:46:47.210 align:middle line:84% There's no room for power cords or other kinds 00:46:47.210 --> 00:46:48.260 align:middle line:90% of things like this. 00:46:48.260 --> 00:46:50.310 align:middle line:84% This is actually one of the most famous examples 00:46:50.310 --> 00:46:53.460 align:middle line:84% in elite private education in the United States, 00:46:53.460 --> 00:47:01.170 align:middle line:84% which is, there were donors to the Phillips Exeter School 00:47:01.170 --> 00:47:05.668 align:middle line:84% who were really concerned that, essentially, there's 00:47:05.668 --> 00:47:07.960 align:middle line:84% too much instructionism and not enough constructionism. 00:47:07.960 --> 00:47:09.460 align:middle line:84% They wouldn't have said it the exact same way, 00:47:09.460 --> 00:47:10.380 align:middle line:84% but they would have said something 00:47:10.380 --> 00:47:11.922 align:middle line:84% along those lines-- too much sitting, 00:47:11.922 --> 00:47:15.570 align:middle line:84% passive listening, not enough engaged conversation. 00:47:15.570 --> 00:47:20.140 align:middle line:84% And so a bunch of donors got together and they said, 00:47:20.140 --> 00:47:22.290 align:middle line:84% in every classroom, we're going to pull out 00:47:22.290 --> 00:47:24.190 align:middle line:84% all of the chairs that look like this, 00:47:24.190 --> 00:47:27.090 align:middle line:84% and we're going to put in these tables, called Harkness tables. 00:47:27.090 --> 00:47:29.070 align:middle line:84% Some of the features of Harkness tables 00:47:29.070 --> 00:47:31.020 align:middle line:84% are that you need to be able to fit everybody 00:47:31.020 --> 00:47:34.140 align:middle line:84% in the class in an oval around the table. 00:47:34.140 --> 00:47:36.360 align:middle line:84% The tables are so large that they usually 00:47:36.360 --> 00:47:39.317 align:middle line:84% have to be built in different pieces 00:47:39.317 --> 00:47:41.400 align:middle line:84% and then shipped into the room, and then assembled 00:47:41.400 --> 00:47:42.580 align:middle line:90% inside the room. 00:47:42.580 --> 00:47:46.120 align:middle line:84% They're incredibly heavy, but they make it 00:47:46.120 --> 00:47:49.250 align:middle line:84% so there is no front of the room. 00:47:49.250 --> 00:47:53.790 align:middle line:84% And at Phillips Exeter and other kinds of independent schools, 00:47:53.790 --> 00:47:56.503 align:middle line:84% they put these tables in every classroom. 00:47:56.503 --> 00:47:58.170 align:middle line:84% They put them in the English classrooms, 00:47:58.170 --> 00:47:59.190 align:middle line:84% they put them in the history classrooms, 00:47:59.190 --> 00:48:00.450 align:middle line:84% but they put them in the math classrooms, 00:48:00.450 --> 00:48:02.150 align:middle line:84% they put them in the science classrooms. 00:48:02.150 --> 00:48:08.060 align:middle line:84% And the intention was to change the physical space in order 00:48:08.060 --> 00:48:10.340 align:middle line:84% to create certain kinds of learning environments 00:48:10.340 --> 00:48:12.210 align:middle line:84% and certain kinds of interactions in there. 00:48:12.210 --> 00:48:15.830 align:middle line:84% Now, of course, you can give a math lecture 00:48:15.830 --> 00:48:20.160 align:middle line:84% in a room like this, but it's hard to lecture for 52 minutes 00:48:20.160 --> 00:48:22.820 align:middle line:84% if you're standing here and half the kids either 00:48:22.820 --> 00:48:25.910 align:middle line:84% have their backs to you or have to rotate around or other kinds 00:48:25.910 --> 00:48:27.140 align:middle line:90% of things like that. 00:48:27.140 --> 00:48:29.460 align:middle line:84% It's designed to make people do that. 00:48:29.460 --> 00:48:36.860 align:middle line:84% So you can think about, what agenda 00:48:36.860 --> 00:48:40.070 align:middle line:84% does this online space have for its occupants? 00:48:40.070 --> 00:48:44.090 align:middle line:84% What is it that a generic Canvas classroom 00:48:44.090 --> 00:48:49.570 align:middle line:84% tells instructors and students that they're supposed to do? 00:48:49.570 --> 00:48:50.990 align:middle line:84% You can look at these links later, 00:48:50.990 --> 00:48:53.410 align:middle line:84% but these are two of the folks who, 00:48:53.410 --> 00:48:57.890 align:middle line:84% as Blackboard was sweeping higher education, 00:48:57.890 --> 00:49:03.280 align:middle line:84% were amongst the most active in trying 00:49:03.280 --> 00:49:04.700 align:middle line:90% to have these conversations. 00:49:04.700 --> 00:49:06.640 align:middle line:84% There was a book that was written 00:49:06.640 --> 00:49:10.540 align:middle line:84% about them and some other people called Edupunks 00:49:10.540 --> 00:49:13.900 align:middle line:84% and trying to make connection between the punk movement 00:49:13.900 --> 00:49:20.380 align:middle line:84% and music, very countercultural, do-it-yourself, 00:49:20.380 --> 00:49:23.230 align:middle line:84% kind of stand up to the man sort of thing. 00:49:23.230 --> 00:49:26.330 align:middle line:84% And folks like the "Reverend" Jim Groom and Alan "Cogdog" 00:49:26.330 --> 00:49:26.830 align:middle line:90% Levine. 00:49:26.830 --> 00:49:29.620 align:middle line:84% They have these monikers because if you were participating 00:49:29.620 --> 00:49:31.330 align:middle line:84% in social networks, you create handles 00:49:31.330 --> 00:49:32.450 align:middle line:90% for those kinds of things. 00:49:32.450 --> 00:49:35.740 align:middle line:84% But also, "Reverend" Jim Groom was a bit of a prophet of such 00:49:35.740 --> 00:49:37.690 align:middle line:90% things. 00:49:37.690 --> 00:49:42.730 align:middle line:84% So what these systems really allow 00:49:42.730 --> 00:49:45.690 align:middle line:84% is a certain kind of coordination. 00:49:45.690 --> 00:49:48.900 align:middle line:84% It becomes very, very easy to say, 00:49:48.900 --> 00:49:51.247 align:middle line:84% all the faculty are going to have a page. 00:49:51.247 --> 00:49:53.080 align:middle line:84% You're all going to create at the same time. 00:49:53.080 --> 00:49:54.450 align:middle line:84% It's going to be automatically generated 00:49:54.450 --> 00:49:56.110 align:middle line:84% for you at the beginning of the semester. 00:49:56.110 --> 00:49:57.430 align:middle line:84% Even if you don't like computers, 00:49:57.430 --> 00:49:59.347 align:middle line:84% we're still going to be able to make you do it 00:49:59.347 --> 00:50:01.020 align:middle line:90% because it's not that hard. 00:50:01.020 --> 00:50:03.510 align:middle line:84% But there are a couple of characteristics of it 00:50:03.510 --> 00:50:05.890 align:middle line:90% that I think are not so good. 00:50:05.890 --> 00:50:11.130 align:middle line:84% I've talked mostly about the stamped piece of it. 00:50:11.130 --> 00:50:16.410 align:middle line:84% There's a way in which the control of all of the learning 00:50:16.410 --> 00:50:20.580 align:middle line:84% artifacts is with the institution and not the people. 00:50:20.580 --> 00:50:23.940 align:middle line:84% So imagine, imagine an infrastructure 00:50:23.940 --> 00:50:27.250 align:middle line:84% for online learning and higher education 00:50:27.250 --> 00:50:31.280 align:middle line:84% where you didn't put all the stuff on someone else's web 00:50:31.280 --> 00:50:31.780 align:middle line:90% page. 00:50:31.780 --> 00:50:33.307 align:middle line:90% You put it on your own web page. 00:50:33.307 --> 00:50:34.890 align:middle line:84% What if, when you went to do homework, 00:50:34.890 --> 00:50:37.120 align:middle line:84% you went to do writing, you went to ask questions, 00:50:37.120 --> 00:50:39.540 align:middle line:84% it didn't show up on the school's Canvas site, which 00:50:39.540 --> 00:50:41.700 align:middle line:84% you don't care about, but it was on your site 00:50:41.700 --> 00:50:42.587 align:middle line:90% in some kind of way? 00:50:42.587 --> 00:50:44.420 align:middle line:84% It was in some of space that you controlled. 00:50:44.420 --> 00:50:47.080 align:middle line:84% And the thing that was always craziest to me about these sites 00:50:47.080 --> 00:50:49.720 align:middle line:84% is that we delete them every 18 months. 00:50:49.720 --> 00:50:51.880 align:middle line:84% It's a strange thing to go to students 00:50:51.880 --> 00:50:56.590 align:middle line:84% and be like, please pour in your best, most thoughtful, most 00:50:56.590 --> 00:50:59.097 align:middle line:90% interesting words, ideas. 00:50:59.097 --> 00:51:00.680 align:middle line:84% Oh, and by the way, 9 months from now, 00:51:00.680 --> 00:51:02.560 align:middle line:84% they're going to be automatically deleted. 00:51:02.560 --> 00:51:07.060 align:middle line:84% That's a strange feature to me of an online learning 00:51:07.060 --> 00:51:07.820 align:middle line:90% environment. 00:51:07.820 --> 00:51:10.580 align:middle line:90% 00:51:10.580 --> 00:51:12.718 align:middle line:84% So me and other folks for a while 00:51:12.718 --> 00:51:14.260 align:middle line:84% were really interested in, well, what 00:51:14.260 --> 00:51:16.660 align:middle line:84% would an alternative to this look like? 00:51:16.660 --> 00:51:21.070 align:middle line:84% What would be something that was not Blackboard, that was not 00:51:21.070 --> 00:51:26.290 align:middle line:84% Canvas, that still could have coordination, but it would have 00:51:26.290 --> 00:51:29.798 align:middle line:84% some of these characteristics that the Web 2.0 open web 00:51:29.798 --> 00:51:30.340 align:middle line:90% movement had? 00:51:30.340 --> 00:51:33.160 align:middle line:84% Like, it let students own their own stuff. 00:51:33.160 --> 00:51:36.680 align:middle line:84% It helped them develop some technology proficiency. 00:51:36.680 --> 00:51:40.490 align:middle line:84% It connected people to each other and to their work. 00:51:40.490 --> 00:51:42.910 align:middle line:84% It didn't just hoover up your stuff, 00:51:42.910 --> 00:51:44.950 align:middle line:84% churn it through, grade it, and delete it, 00:51:44.950 --> 00:51:47.283 align:middle line:84% but it would be something that you owned and cared about 00:51:47.283 --> 00:51:47.820 align:middle line:90% for a while. 00:51:47.820 --> 00:51:49.290 align:middle line:90% AUDIENCE: What is in your hands? 00:51:49.290 --> 00:51:51.165 align:middle line:84% JUSTIN REICH: Those are ice cream sandwiches. 00:51:51.165 --> 00:51:53.490 align:middle line:90% 00:51:53.490 --> 00:51:54.610 align:middle line:90% Yeah, good. 00:51:54.610 --> 00:51:55.110 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:51:55.110 --> 00:51:58.290 align:middle line:84% So it's a good-- it's a good picture. 00:51:58.290 --> 00:52:02.290 align:middle line:84% It definitely evokes some of these kinds of pictures. 00:52:02.290 --> 00:52:06.060 align:middle line:84% Some of these kinds of pictures ended up on professor Twitter 00:52:06.060 --> 00:52:08.160 align:middle line:90% handles in 2013. 00:52:08.160 --> 00:52:09.520 align:middle line:90% I didn't make that picture. 00:52:09.520 --> 00:52:12.250 align:middle line:84% I had one semester where, I don't know, 00:52:12.250 --> 00:52:14.500 align:middle line:84% some students were enjoying class, 00:52:14.500 --> 00:52:16.050 align:middle line:84% and they sent me a whole bunch of-- 00:52:16.050 --> 00:52:16.690 align:middle line:90% I don't know. 00:52:16.690 --> 00:52:20.100 align:middle line:84% How quickly can I find these things? 00:52:20.100 --> 00:52:21.680 align:middle line:90% There's one of me. 00:52:21.680 --> 00:52:31.740 align:middle line:90% 00:52:31.740 --> 00:52:33.245 align:middle line:90% Are these going to be on here? 00:52:33.245 --> 00:52:36.660 align:middle line:90% 00:52:36.660 --> 00:52:38.100 align:middle line:90% There's a few. 00:52:38.100 --> 00:52:39.080 align:middle line:90% There's this one. 00:52:39.080 --> 00:52:43.070 align:middle line:90% 00:52:43.070 --> 00:52:45.140 align:middle line:90% This one. 00:52:45.140 --> 00:52:48.350 align:middle line:90% Oh, no, that's a real one. 00:52:48.350 --> 00:52:50.030 align:middle line:90% Justin is LeBron James. 00:52:50.030 --> 00:52:52.640 align:middle line:84% A little dicey to be doing this one these days. 00:52:52.640 --> 00:52:56.090 align:middle line:84% I probably wouldn't-- you probably wouldn't put white 00:52:56.090 --> 00:52:58.050 align:middle line:84% Justin into a black body anymore. 00:52:58.050 --> 00:53:00.500 align:middle line:90% But back in the day. 00:53:00.500 --> 00:53:01.220 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 00:53:01.220 --> 00:53:02.202 align:middle line:90% For one day for class-- 00:53:02.202 --> 00:53:04.410 align:middle line:84% I think something terrible had happened in the world, 00:53:04.410 --> 00:53:06.702 align:middle line:84% and I made them ice cream sandwiches one day for class. 00:53:06.702 --> 00:53:09.560 align:middle line:84% And so they made that picture there. 00:53:09.560 --> 00:53:12.497 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: What were you originally holding? 00:53:12.497 --> 00:53:13.580 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: It was for-- 00:53:13.580 --> 00:53:18.890 align:middle line:84% [LAUGHS] We're getting to the real issues now. 00:53:18.890 --> 00:53:22.400 align:middle line:84% I think that I went to the International 00:53:22.400 --> 00:53:25.140 align:middle line:84% Society for Technology in Education Conference, 00:53:25.140 --> 00:53:29.000 align:middle line:84% and they basically grabbed a bunch of random people 00:53:29.000 --> 00:53:32.390 align:middle line:84% and took them to a photo shoot to generate their own stock 00:53:32.390 --> 00:53:34.560 align:middle line:90% photos. 00:53:34.560 --> 00:53:36.560 align:middle line:84% They wanted to have a whole set of stock photos 00:53:36.560 --> 00:53:39.730 align:middle line:84% that were from the membership of this organization. 00:53:39.730 --> 00:53:41.170 align:middle line:90% And so it was just like-- 00:53:41.170 --> 00:53:42.712 align:middle line:84% I don't think I was holding anything. 00:53:42.712 --> 00:53:46.350 align:middle line:84% I mean, you can imagine this as generic invitation 00:53:46.350 --> 00:53:48.450 align:middle line:90% to some kind of thing. 00:53:48.450 --> 00:53:49.950 align:middle line:84% But that's where all that came from. 00:53:49.950 --> 00:53:54.010 align:middle line:90% 00:53:54.010 --> 00:53:55.750 align:middle line:84% Is this worth your learning time? 00:53:55.750 --> 00:53:58.200 align:middle line:84% Hard to say, but it's pretty fun. 00:53:58.200 --> 00:53:58.700 align:middle line:90% OK. 00:53:58.700 --> 00:54:03.360 align:middle line:84% This you should remember a little bit. 00:54:03.360 --> 00:54:10.930 align:middle line:84% This is another branch of constructionism. 00:54:10.930 --> 00:54:13.000 align:middle line:84% All these ideas just repeat themselves. 00:54:13.000 --> 00:54:14.880 align:middle line:84% They get reinvented over and over again. 00:54:14.880 --> 00:54:19.140 align:middle line:84% These two Canadian educators, people who founded the 2007-2008 00:54:19.140 --> 00:54:21.640 align:middle line:84% original massive open online courses. 00:54:21.640 --> 00:54:24.510 align:middle line:84% And they had this idea called connectivism. 00:54:24.510 --> 00:54:28.470 align:middle line:84% And they said, part of the problem with learning theory 00:54:28.470 --> 00:54:32.430 align:middle line:84% is that it thinks that learning happens 00:54:32.430 --> 00:54:35.530 align:middle line:84% and knowledge exists inside people's heads, 00:54:35.530 --> 00:54:38.870 align:middle line:84% but learning and knowledge really exists between people 00:54:38.870 --> 00:54:41.210 align:middle line:90% more than exists within people. 00:54:41.210 --> 00:54:43.662 align:middle line:84% There's a famous line, which you probably all 00:54:43.662 --> 00:54:45.620 align:middle line:84% would agree with in some way, that the smartest 00:54:45.620 --> 00:54:49.820 align:middle line:84% person in the room is the room, that the collective capacity 00:54:49.820 --> 00:54:53.000 align:middle line:84% of people is where the heart of our intelligence lives. 00:54:53.000 --> 00:54:55.325 align:middle line:84% Connectivism almost went further and said, 00:54:55.325 --> 00:54:58.280 align:middle line:84% maybe the only intelligence in the room is the room. 00:54:58.280 --> 00:55:00.080 align:middle line:84% Maybe your knowledge, your understanding 00:55:00.080 --> 00:55:04.430 align:middle line:84% doesn't exist without social convention, like language, 00:55:04.430 --> 00:55:07.730 align:middle line:84% like culture, other kinds of things like that. 00:55:07.730 --> 00:55:11.990 align:middle line:84% So this was, at first, an educational philosophy. 00:55:11.990 --> 00:55:14.450 align:middle line:84% Maybe it was an epistemology, maybe 00:55:14.450 --> 00:55:15.840 align:middle line:84% it was a philosophy of knowledge. 00:55:15.840 --> 00:55:19.640 align:middle line:84% But then it got translated into these pedagogical ideas. 00:55:19.640 --> 00:55:21.690 align:middle line:84% And the pedagogical ideas were, say, 00:55:21.690 --> 00:55:26.660 align:middle line:84% what if you defined courses where their primary value was 00:55:26.660 --> 00:55:31.850 align:middle line:84% creating connections between people and ideas? 00:55:31.850 --> 00:55:33.852 align:middle line:84% One of the things Stephen Downes said 00:55:33.852 --> 00:55:35.810 align:middle line:84% about this, which you'll find it very connected 00:55:35.810 --> 00:55:37.340 align:middle line:90% to situated learning. 00:55:37.340 --> 00:55:42.350 align:middle line:84% He says, if you become a physicist, what happens? 00:55:42.350 --> 00:55:45.200 align:middle line:84% Well, you read physics papers, and you 00:55:45.200 --> 00:55:47.660 align:middle line:84% follow new ideas in physics, and you figure out 00:55:47.660 --> 00:55:49.430 align:middle line:84% where physicists talk to each other 00:55:49.430 --> 00:55:52.580 align:middle line:84% and where the physics lounge is and which 00:55:52.580 --> 00:55:54.440 align:middle line:90% physics conferences to go to-- 00:55:54.440 --> 00:55:56.220 align:middle line:84% I don't know-- what music physicists like, 00:55:56.220 --> 00:55:57.803 align:middle line:84% what television shows they find funny, 00:55:57.803 --> 00:55:59.030 align:middle line:90% all these kinds of things. 00:55:59.030 --> 00:56:01.580 align:middle line:84% That is as much a part of becoming a physicist 00:56:01.580 --> 00:56:04.165 align:middle line:84% as learning formulas and theories and knowledge 00:56:04.165 --> 00:56:05.040 align:middle line:90% and things like that. 00:56:05.040 --> 00:56:07.400 align:middle line:84% What if we had educational systems that took that really 00:56:07.400 --> 00:56:08.130 align:middle line:90% seriously? 00:56:08.130 --> 00:56:11.840 align:middle line:84% Like, the job of a physics class is not just 00:56:11.840 --> 00:56:15.680 align:middle line:84% to have you be able to learn some formulas about Newton's 00:56:15.680 --> 00:56:19.140 align:middle line:84% three laws, but to connect to other physicists. 00:56:19.140 --> 00:56:22.580 align:middle line:90% That's kind of a cool idea. 00:56:22.580 --> 00:56:25.020 align:middle line:84% One of the most radical things Stephen Downes ever said, 00:56:25.020 --> 00:56:27.240 align:middle line:84% he said something along the lines of, in my class, 00:56:27.240 --> 00:56:29.480 align:middle line:90% the content is MacGuffin. 00:56:29.480 --> 00:56:32.210 align:middle line:84% A MacGuffin is the thing in a movie 00:56:32.210 --> 00:56:35.430 align:middle line:84% that's not really important, that drives the plot forward. 00:56:35.430 --> 00:56:38.055 align:middle line:84% It's the briefcase that gets switched in the beginning, which 00:56:38.055 --> 00:56:39.930 align:middle line:84% helps two people fall in love with each other 00:56:39.930 --> 00:56:41.220 align:middle line:90% or something like that. 00:56:41.220 --> 00:56:43.290 align:middle line:84% The MacGuffin is the thing that you're chasing 00:56:43.290 --> 00:56:44.707 align:middle line:90% to make the plot move forward. 00:56:44.707 --> 00:56:46.540 align:middle line:84% This is a radical statement for an educator. 00:56:46.540 --> 00:56:48.190 align:middle line:90% The content is a MacGuffin. 00:56:48.190 --> 00:56:50.980 align:middle line:84% The thing that I told you the class is about is a trick. 00:56:50.980 --> 00:56:52.770 align:middle line:84% The real part of the class is getting 00:56:52.770 --> 00:56:54.988 align:middle line:84% you connected to each other, to things 00:56:54.988 --> 00:56:57.280 align:middle line:84% that you're interested in, to other kinds of expertise. 00:56:57.280 --> 00:56:59.250 align:middle line:84% It's a very radical set of ideas, 00:56:59.250 --> 00:57:03.480 align:middle line:84% and there are a lot of people who are profoundly influenced 00:57:03.480 --> 00:57:06.670 align:middle line:84% by them and people trying to say, yeah, well, 00:57:06.670 --> 00:57:10.020 align:middle line:84% what could some genuine alternative 00:57:10.020 --> 00:57:14.610 align:middle line:84% architecture to Canvas that embraced some 00:57:14.610 --> 00:57:19.030 align:middle line:84% of these ideas of the open web of Web 2.0 of connectivism, 00:57:19.030 --> 00:57:20.280 align:middle line:90% what might it look like? 00:57:20.280 --> 00:57:23.170 align:middle line:90% And so this no longer exists. 00:57:23.170 --> 00:57:26.700 align:middle line:84% I don't think either of those links are live anymore. 00:57:26.700 --> 00:57:29.610 align:middle line:84% But this is what the website for this class, 00:57:29.610 --> 00:57:33.370 align:middle line:84% or an earlier version of this class, used to look like. 00:57:33.370 --> 00:57:37.300 align:middle line:84% And here's how the infrastructure of it worked. 00:57:37.300 --> 00:57:40.480 align:middle line:84% At the beginning of class, folks were 00:57:40.480 --> 00:57:43.210 align:middle line:84% assigned to create spaces where they would 00:57:43.210 --> 00:57:45.123 align:middle line:90% do the work of this class. 00:57:45.123 --> 00:57:46.790 align:middle line:84% So you wouldn't have a learning journal. 00:57:46.790 --> 00:57:50.110 align:middle line:84% You wouldn't have a Canvas discussion page or something 00:57:50.110 --> 00:57:50.810 align:middle line:90% like that. 00:57:50.810 --> 00:57:52.220 align:middle line:90% Go make your own blog. 00:57:52.220 --> 00:57:53.690 align:middle line:90% Go make your own Tumblr page. 00:57:53.690 --> 00:57:55.070 align:middle line:90% Go make your own Twitter feed. 00:57:55.070 --> 00:57:56.570 align:middle line:90% Go make your own Flickr page. 00:57:56.570 --> 00:57:58.750 align:middle line:84% Make all kinds of other things like that 00:57:58.750 --> 00:58:03.860 align:middle line:84% and do all of the work for this class in your own space. 00:58:03.860 --> 00:58:06.160 align:middle line:84% Now, one problem with that is that nobody can 00:58:06.160 --> 00:58:07.570 align:middle line:90% find that stuff anymore now. 00:58:07.570 --> 00:58:09.170 align:middle line:84% It's all on other people's things. 00:58:09.170 --> 00:58:11.770 align:middle line:84% But that's a solvable problem, because we're 00:58:11.770 --> 00:58:14.290 align:middle line:84% going to build this thing called the Syndication bus. 00:58:14.290 --> 00:58:18.170 align:middle line:84% And the Syndication Bus is going to depend on this technology, 00:58:18.170 --> 00:58:18.760 align:middle line:90% which-- 00:58:18.760 --> 00:58:21.177 align:middle line:84% how many of you are familiar with real simple syndication? 00:58:21.177 --> 00:58:23.390 align:middle line:84% Is it something that you vaguely know exists? 00:58:23.390 --> 00:58:26.470 align:middle line:84% So again, 10 or 15 years ago, this 00:58:26.470 --> 00:58:29.137 align:middle line:84% was considered an essential part of the web. 00:58:29.137 --> 00:58:31.220 align:middle line:84% And there are many people who would have told you, 00:58:31.220 --> 00:58:35.140 align:middle line:84% this is the future of how people will find things. 00:58:35.140 --> 00:58:41.070 align:middle line:84% So Jaren was telling us before about the YouTube algorithm 00:58:41.070 --> 00:58:43.470 align:middle line:84% kind of controlling what he watches and what he finds 00:58:43.470 --> 00:58:44.350 align:middle line:90% and things like that. 00:58:44.350 --> 00:58:48.420 align:middle line:84% An alternative to that was you subscribe to a series of feeds. 00:58:48.420 --> 00:58:50.940 align:middle line:84% So you would find all the bloggers that you like 00:58:50.940 --> 00:58:53.315 align:middle line:84% or all the video bloggers that you like or whatever else. 00:58:53.315 --> 00:58:55.740 align:middle line:84% You would choose their feeds, and then you would have-- 00:58:55.740 --> 00:58:58.590 align:middle line:84% one really popular technology was called Google Reader, which 00:58:58.590 --> 00:59:01.630 align:middle line:84% just gave you the things that came out of those feeds. 00:59:01.630 --> 00:59:06.120 align:middle line:84% So instead of being bounced around by an algorithm 00:59:06.120 --> 00:59:08.370 align:middle line:84% to things that people think are popular or interesting 00:59:08.370 --> 00:59:11.500 align:middle line:84% and things like that, you have more control over that. 00:59:11.500 --> 00:59:14.820 align:middle line:84% So basically what we did was, everyone 00:59:14.820 --> 00:59:16.690 align:middle line:84% would create their own online space, 00:59:16.690 --> 00:59:18.930 align:middle line:84% and then we would use this Syndication Bus 00:59:18.930 --> 00:59:20.320 align:middle line:90% to aggregate all those things. 00:59:20.320 --> 00:59:22.996 align:middle line:90% So effectively we would-- 00:59:22.996 --> 00:59:26.250 align:middle line:90% oh, where am I? 00:59:26.250 --> 00:59:28.230 align:middle line:84% There's an animation there that's missing. 00:59:28.230 --> 00:59:30.840 align:middle line:84% We would make a copy of each of these pieces, 00:59:30.840 --> 00:59:33.810 align:middle line:84% and we would pull the copy into the Syndication Bus. 00:59:33.810 --> 00:59:35.810 align:middle line:84% So you owned your own thing, but we 00:59:35.810 --> 00:59:39.080 align:middle line:84% would use RSS to grab one copy of those things, 00:59:39.080 --> 00:59:43.580 align:middle line:84% and then we would aggregate them in different kinds of ways. 00:59:43.580 --> 00:59:48.200 align:middle line:84% So imagine if every time you wrote in your learning journal-- 00:59:48.200 --> 00:59:50.720 align:middle line:84% you didn't just write in your own Google Slides, 00:59:50.720 --> 00:59:52.550 align:middle line:90% but you wrote on a blog-- 00:59:52.550 --> 00:59:55.140 align:middle line:84% anybody could subscribe to that blog. 00:59:55.140 --> 00:59:57.080 align:middle line:84% But the course subscribed to the blog 00:59:57.080 --> 01:00:01.730 align:middle line:84% and hoovered all of those things up into one space. 01:00:01.730 --> 01:00:06.170 align:middle line:84% You could also teach people other ways of aggregating 01:00:06.170 --> 01:00:08.870 align:middle line:84% things, like, any time in any of the spaces 01:00:08.870 --> 01:00:11.060 align:middle line:84% that you're working, you share something 01:00:11.060 --> 01:00:14.990 align:middle line:84% that we might be interested, tag it with T509 Massive. 01:00:14.990 --> 01:00:18.580 align:middle line:84% And then what gets populated in this Syndication Bus Twitter 01:00:18.580 --> 01:00:20.330 align:middle line:84% channel is all the tweets that people have 01:00:20.330 --> 01:00:21.910 align:middle line:90% that are about T509 Massive. 01:00:21.910 --> 01:00:25.700 align:middle line:90% 01:00:25.700 --> 01:00:31.940 align:middle line:84% Then, when you showed up on the home page, I as the instructor 01:00:31.940 --> 01:00:33.500 align:middle line:84% would pick a few of these things. 01:00:33.500 --> 01:00:35.770 align:middle line:84% So there was a section called the Spotlight, where 01:00:35.770 --> 01:00:38.270 align:middle line:84% I would go through all the stuff that people were generating 01:00:38.270 --> 01:00:41.050 align:middle line:84% every week and pick a few things that I thought were particularly 01:00:41.050 --> 01:00:43.092 align:middle line:84% interesting, particularly important, particularly 01:00:43.092 --> 01:00:48.130 align:middle line:84% funny, stuff like that, and show them to people to feature them. 01:00:48.130 --> 01:00:52.450 align:middle line:84% And then-- that's probably kind of less important. 01:00:52.450 --> 01:00:54.880 align:middle line:84% But then there are other spaces-- 01:00:54.880 --> 01:00:57.890 align:middle line:84% I could create spaces that were about a particular assignment. 01:00:57.890 --> 01:01:00.593 align:middle line:84% You could say, OK, everybody is working on your-- 01:01:00.593 --> 01:01:02.510 align:middle line:84% oh, I want to tell you how I graded the class. 01:01:02.510 --> 01:01:04.750 align:middle line:84% But I could say, everybody create your rubric, 01:01:04.750 --> 01:01:06.760 align:middle line:84% and then pull all of those things 01:01:06.760 --> 01:01:08.697 align:middle line:84% together, have a kind of rubric hub 01:01:08.697 --> 01:01:10.280 align:middle line:84% that everybody could see those things. 01:01:10.280 --> 01:01:12.780 align:middle line:84% And then we had a space, I think it was called the Fire Hose 01:01:12.780 --> 01:01:14.440 align:middle line:84% or something like that, where it was 01:01:14.440 --> 01:01:17.350 align:middle line:90% everything that was coming in. 01:01:17.350 --> 01:01:19.030 align:middle line:84% There were probably 50 or 60 people 01:01:19.030 --> 01:01:20.540 align:middle line:84% who took this version of the class, 01:01:20.540 --> 01:01:22.123 align:middle line:84% and so there was no way that everybody 01:01:22.123 --> 01:01:24.380 align:middle line:84% was going to read everything that everyone else did. 01:01:24.380 --> 01:01:28.550 align:middle line:84% But a part of class every week was finding out, 01:01:28.550 --> 01:01:30.557 align:middle line:90% who are you connected with? 01:01:30.557 --> 01:01:31.890 align:middle line:90% Who are you finding interesting? 01:01:31.890 --> 01:01:33.180 align:middle line:90% Who are you learning from? 01:01:33.180 --> 01:01:35.180 align:middle line:84% Oh, you four were English teachers 01:01:35.180 --> 01:01:36.430 align:middle line:90% before you came in this class? 01:01:36.430 --> 01:01:38.097 align:middle line:84% You should be networked with each other. 01:01:38.097 --> 01:01:39.530 align:middle line:84% Moreover, you should be networked 01:01:39.530 --> 01:01:41.150 align:middle line:90% to other English teachers. 01:01:41.150 --> 01:01:42.600 align:middle line:84% The things that you're generating, 01:01:42.600 --> 01:01:44.910 align:middle line:84% if you're putting a bunch of work into this class, 01:01:44.910 --> 01:01:47.737 align:middle line:84% why just have it sit in a discussion forum 01:01:47.737 --> 01:01:49.320 align:middle line:84% that no one's ever going to see again. 01:01:49.320 --> 01:01:51.560 align:middle line:84% Put it in this space where you can share with other people 01:01:51.560 --> 01:01:52.393 align:middle line:90% and stuff like that. 01:01:52.393 --> 01:01:59.060 align:middle line:90% 01:01:59.060 --> 01:02:04.040 align:middle line:84% If you take this idea of letting people 01:02:04.040 --> 01:02:07.430 align:middle line:84% choose how they want to share, who they want to connect 01:02:07.430 --> 01:02:11.585 align:middle line:84% with seriously, the more and more you get to this idea of, 01:02:11.585 --> 01:02:13.692 align:middle line:90% there's no right way to do this. 01:02:13.692 --> 01:02:15.900 align:middle line:84% You're all coming to this class with different goals. 01:02:15.900 --> 01:02:19.070 align:middle line:84% Maybe some of you really want to connect with other edtech 01:02:19.070 --> 01:02:21.650 align:middle line:84% companies and are interested in being a founder 01:02:21.650 --> 01:02:22.710 align:middle line:90% or working for a startup. 01:02:22.710 --> 01:02:24.630 align:middle line:84% Maybe some of you want to go into education research. 01:02:24.630 --> 01:02:26.010 align:middle line:84% Maybe some of you want to go into teaching. 01:02:26.010 --> 01:02:27.910 align:middle line:84% Why should you all have the same criteria 01:02:27.910 --> 01:02:30.118 align:middle line:84% for what you're writing about or what you're sharing? 01:02:30.118 --> 01:02:31.692 align:middle line:84% Why don't you just tell me what it is 01:02:31.692 --> 01:02:32.900 align:middle line:90% that you want to learn about? 01:02:32.900 --> 01:02:34.608 align:middle line:84% Why don't you tell me what your goals are 01:02:34.608 --> 01:02:36.970 align:middle line:90% for this kind of communication? 01:02:36.970 --> 01:02:41.313 align:middle line:84% And so people would create their own rubrics about-- 01:02:41.313 --> 01:02:43.730 align:middle line:84% essentially, you tell me what your blog is supposed to do, 01:02:43.730 --> 01:02:44.813 align:middle line:90% is supposed to accomplish. 01:02:44.813 --> 01:02:46.990 align:middle line:84% I think at one point, there was a part 01:02:46.990 --> 01:02:49.332 align:middle line:84% of the assignment which you had to say, describe 01:02:49.332 --> 01:02:51.790 align:middle line:84% how your writing is going to benefit you and your learning, 01:02:51.790 --> 01:02:53.110 align:middle line:84% how your writing is going to benefit 01:02:53.110 --> 01:02:55.540 align:middle line:84% the other people in this class, and how your writing might 01:02:55.540 --> 01:02:57.697 align:middle line:84% plausibly benefit some other community somewhere 01:02:57.697 --> 01:02:59.780 align:middle line:84% else that you're connected to in some kind of way. 01:02:59.780 --> 01:03:00.560 align:middle line:90% This was a professional-- 01:03:00.560 --> 01:03:02.600 align:middle line:84% I taught this at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 01:03:02.600 --> 01:03:04.017 align:middle line:84% So people were, for the most part, 01:03:04.017 --> 01:03:06.880 align:middle line:84% already coming in with some kind of professional communities 01:03:06.880 --> 01:03:10.300 align:middle line:90% from outside to network. 01:03:10.300 --> 01:03:16.810 align:middle line:84% And there were lots of other people 01:03:16.810 --> 01:03:19.540 align:middle line:84% who were doing this kind of thing. 01:03:19.540 --> 01:03:21.640 align:middle line:84% This was a course called Connected Courses, which 01:03:21.640 --> 01:03:24.960 align:middle line:84% was basically teaching people across higher education how 01:03:24.960 --> 01:03:27.270 align:middle line:84% you would go about creating these courses. 01:03:27.270 --> 01:03:29.755 align:middle line:84% But people built them in anthropology. 01:03:29.755 --> 01:03:32.130 align:middle line:84% Probably one of the most famous ones, which I think still 01:03:32.130 --> 01:03:36.090 align:middle line:84% has a bunch of stuff which exists, is called DS106, Digital 01:03:36.090 --> 01:03:39.660 align:middle line:84% Storytelling 106, which was a course offered 01:03:39.660 --> 01:03:41.410 align:middle line:84% at the University of Mary Washington, 01:03:41.410 --> 01:03:44.340 align:middle line:84% but essentially syndicated to a bunch of other universities 01:03:44.340 --> 01:03:46.170 align:middle line:90% and also built in such a way-- 01:03:46.170 --> 01:03:49.710 align:middle line:84% you can probably still go to ds106.org right now. 01:03:49.710 --> 01:03:53.370 align:middle line:84% And it was mostly about creative assignments. 01:03:53.370 --> 01:03:57.653 align:middle line:84% They had a feature called the Daily Create where, 01:03:57.653 --> 01:03:59.320 align:middle line:84% if you took this class four days a week, 01:03:59.320 --> 01:04:00.945 align:middle line:84% you were supposed to do a daily create. 01:04:00.945 --> 01:04:03.870 align:middle line:84% It might be something like-- my favorite one was, 01:04:03.870 --> 01:04:06.330 align:middle line:84% pull out your keychain and make a short video 01:04:06.330 --> 01:04:09.180 align:middle line:84% where you tell the story of your keychain. 01:04:09.180 --> 01:04:10.750 align:middle line:90% Where does each key come from? 01:04:10.750 --> 01:04:11.830 align:middle line:90% What does it mean to you? 01:04:11.830 --> 01:04:14.770 align:middle line:90% Other kinds of things like that. 01:04:14.770 --> 01:04:19.440 align:middle line:84% Figuring out how to make their way across the web. 01:04:19.440 --> 01:04:22.510 align:middle line:84% So I told you this was a story, essentially, of a failed 01:04:22.510 --> 01:04:24.890 align:middle line:90% enterprise. 01:04:24.890 --> 01:04:26.980 align:middle line:84% Clearly, I'm not teaching like this anymore. 01:04:26.980 --> 01:04:29.150 align:middle line:84% You won't find many other classes. 01:04:29.150 --> 01:04:32.390 align:middle line:84% You'll find the idea is kind out there, 01:04:32.390 --> 01:04:37.210 align:middle line:84% percolating in different spaces, but probably 01:04:37.210 --> 01:04:38.680 align:middle line:90% doesn't really exist. 01:04:38.680 --> 01:04:39.680 align:middle line:90% Why did it fail? 01:04:39.680 --> 01:04:41.180 align:middle line:90% Probably two big reasons. 01:04:41.180 --> 01:04:43.000 align:middle line:84% One that we'll keep coming back to, 01:04:43.000 --> 01:04:45.610 align:middle line:84% which I've termed the Curse of the Familiar, which is, 01:04:45.610 --> 01:04:47.170 align:middle line:90% it's just weird. 01:04:47.170 --> 01:04:48.350 align:middle line:90% It's different. 01:04:48.350 --> 01:04:49.520 align:middle line:90% It's unusual. 01:04:49.520 --> 01:04:51.140 align:middle line:84% It takes a bunch of time to learn. 01:04:51.140 --> 01:04:52.600 align:middle line:84% On the one hand, I think people who 01:04:52.600 --> 01:04:54.410 align:middle line:84% participate in these classes were like, 01:04:54.410 --> 01:04:56.410 align:middle line:84% oh man, I learned a lot of stuff about blogging, 01:04:56.410 --> 01:04:58.743 align:middle line:84% about using Twitter, about connecting with other people, 01:04:58.743 --> 01:04:59.750 align:middle line:90% about social networking. 01:04:59.750 --> 01:05:04.245 align:middle line:84% But, my guy, the class was intermediate statistics. 01:05:04.245 --> 01:05:05.620 align:middle line:84% That's not what you were supposed 01:05:05.620 --> 01:05:07.210 align:middle line:90% to be learning in this thing. 01:05:07.210 --> 01:05:09.400 align:middle line:84% There were a handful of universities 01:05:09.400 --> 01:05:12.280 align:middle line:84% that built a collaborative infrastructure 01:05:12.280 --> 01:05:15.850 align:middle line:84% around this stuff, in the hopes that you could drive down 01:05:15.850 --> 01:05:16.880 align:middle line:90% some of the complexity. 01:05:16.880 --> 01:05:20.710 align:middle line:84% So this guy, Jim Groom, built a company called Reclaim Hosting, 01:05:20.710 --> 01:05:22.350 align:middle line:90% which tried to make it really-- 01:05:22.350 --> 01:05:24.750 align:middle line:84% universities could sign up to make 01:05:24.750 --> 01:05:27.467 align:middle line:84% it really easy for every student in the school to start a blog. 01:05:27.467 --> 01:05:29.800 align:middle line:84% And then you teach them all about blogging a little bit, 01:05:29.800 --> 01:05:32.133 align:middle line:84% and then maybe you could get away from discussion forums 01:05:32.133 --> 01:05:35.125 align:middle line:84% and have people do most of their short form writing on blogs. 01:05:35.125 --> 01:05:37.750 align:middle line:84% Maybe there are some people out there that are still trying it, 01:05:37.750 --> 01:05:40.800 align:middle line:90% but not that much. 01:05:40.800 --> 01:05:46.500 align:middle line:84% And then another huge challenge with asking people 01:05:46.500 --> 01:05:49.800 align:middle line:84% to write publicly is that we are not all 01:05:49.800 --> 01:05:52.620 align:middle line:84% equally vulnerable to the consequences 01:05:52.620 --> 01:05:55.180 align:middle line:90% of having our writing be read. 01:05:55.180 --> 01:05:57.660 align:middle line:90% Anybody recognize this person? 01:05:57.660 --> 01:06:02.160 align:middle line:84% She's a woman named Anita Sarkeesian, who 01:06:02.160 --> 01:06:06.030 align:middle line:84% had a website called Feminist Frequency, which 01:06:06.030 --> 01:06:10.440 align:middle line:84% was one of the initial spaces that was related 01:06:10.440 --> 01:06:13.260 align:middle line:90% to what became Gamergate. 01:06:13.260 --> 01:06:16.620 align:middle line:84% She made a bunch of videos basically about 01:06:16.620 --> 01:06:19.300 align:middle line:84% anti-feminist themes in video games, 01:06:19.300 --> 01:06:25.315 align:middle line:84% like how there's always a princess that needs to be saved, 01:06:25.315 --> 01:06:26.690 align:middle line:84% and the princess doesn't actually 01:06:26.690 --> 01:06:28.670 align:middle line:84% have to-- doesn't get to have her own character 01:06:28.670 --> 01:06:30.240 align:middle line:90% and things like that. 01:06:30.240 --> 01:06:37.820 align:middle line:84% And just piled on ruthlessly by all kinds of people, especially 01:06:37.820 --> 01:06:40.580 align:middle line:84% people who saw gaming as a hobby, who didn't 01:06:40.580 --> 01:06:42.710 align:middle line:90% want these tropes changed. 01:06:42.710 --> 01:06:45.768 align:middle line:84% And so people get doxxed and swatted 01:06:45.768 --> 01:06:48.060 align:middle line:84% and all kinds of-- are you all familiar with Gamergate? 01:06:48.060 --> 01:06:49.070 align:middle line:90% Is that a phrase that-- 01:06:49.070 --> 01:06:49.850 align:middle line:90% OK. 01:06:49.850 --> 01:06:53.630 align:middle line:84% So I don't even remember what year this was now. 01:06:53.630 --> 01:06:54.380 align:middle line:90% I don't know. 01:06:54.380 --> 01:06:55.600 align:middle line:84% In the Media Studies department, we 01:06:55.600 --> 01:06:57.433 align:middle line:84% should be teaching a class called Gamergate. 01:06:57.433 --> 01:06:58.790 align:middle line:90% It was kind of-- 01:06:58.790 --> 01:07:02.510 align:middle line:84% it seemed ludicrous at the time, but it 01:07:02.510 --> 01:07:08.960 align:middle line:84% was a way of organizing groups of people 01:07:08.960 --> 01:07:11.360 align:middle line:84% to effectively suppress communication 01:07:11.360 --> 01:07:14.700 align:middle line:84% from subaltern perspectives, from people 01:07:14.700 --> 01:07:16.700 align:middle line:84% who are trying to say different kinds of things. 01:07:16.700 --> 01:07:20.440 align:middle line:84% So anyway, for me as a pretty privileged white dude 01:07:20.440 --> 01:07:22.060 align:middle line:84% blogging my way through the world, 01:07:22.060 --> 01:07:24.470 align:middle line:84% it's relatively safe and relatively straightforward. 01:07:24.470 --> 01:07:26.303 align:middle line:84% But if I have 50 or 60 students in my class, 01:07:26.303 --> 01:07:28.762 align:middle line:84% they're all going to be coming from different perspectives, 01:07:28.762 --> 01:07:30.430 align:middle line:84% and they're all going to be inequitably 01:07:30.430 --> 01:07:33.070 align:middle line:84% vulnerable to writing something which 01:07:33.070 --> 01:07:36.500 align:middle line:84% catches the attention in negative ways of big crowds, 01:07:36.500 --> 01:07:39.268 align:middle line:84% or offends people, or messes up their relationship 01:07:39.268 --> 01:07:40.310 align:middle line:90% or other kinds of things. 01:07:40.310 --> 01:07:43.480 align:middle line:84% I mean, part of what you want to do in writing in a class 01:07:43.480 --> 01:07:45.515 align:middle line:84% is let people be experimental and try 01:07:45.515 --> 01:07:47.140 align:middle line:84% on ideas that they don't agree with yet 01:07:47.140 --> 01:07:48.140 align:middle line:90% or don't understand yet. 01:07:48.140 --> 01:07:52.150 align:middle line:90% 01:07:52.150 --> 01:07:54.650 align:middle line:84% And then, when I was doing this in 2013, 01:07:54.650 --> 01:07:57.200 align:middle line:84% that felt a little bit risky, maybe. 01:07:57.200 --> 01:08:00.730 align:middle line:84% Yeah, I could imagine someone might take down a post that they 01:08:00.730 --> 01:08:04.420 align:middle line:84% decide wasn't well worded or disagree with, things like that. 01:08:04.420 --> 01:08:09.020 align:middle line:84% In 2024, it seems substantially more risky. 01:08:09.020 --> 01:08:14.860 align:middle line:84% I would say not just because of heightened sensitivities, 01:08:14.860 --> 01:08:19.100 align:middle line:84% but because actors in society have learned 01:08:19.100 --> 01:08:25.399 align:middle line:84% how to broadcast messages that appear online 01:08:25.399 --> 01:08:28.040 align:middle line:84% in various kinds of places and to use them 01:08:28.040 --> 01:08:31.609 align:middle line:84% to generate outrage and drive traffic and those kinds 01:08:31.609 --> 01:08:34.189 align:middle line:90% of things. 01:08:34.189 --> 01:08:37.460 align:middle line:84% Oh, this was the company, Reclaim Hosting. 01:08:37.460 --> 01:08:41.330 align:middle line:84% And somebody should Google Reclaim Hosting 01:08:41.330 --> 01:08:45.500 align:middle line:84% and see if they're still known for education. 01:08:45.500 --> 01:08:47.689 align:middle line:84% It was a project that was basically-- 01:08:47.689 --> 01:08:51.200 align:middle line:84% it was trying to take everything that I just described and figure 01:08:51.200 --> 01:08:55.170 align:middle line:84% out, how do you make a really simple front end for it 01:08:55.170 --> 01:08:57.710 align:middle line:84% so it's not hard for people to build, 01:08:57.710 --> 01:09:00.240 align:middle line:84% but it still lets people own stuff? 01:09:00.240 --> 01:09:04.670 align:middle line:84% It still lets people be the owner of their own means 01:09:04.670 --> 01:09:07.520 align:middle line:90% of production. 01:09:07.520 --> 01:09:09.979 align:middle line:84% But it's something that I think will-- 01:09:09.979 --> 01:09:16.960 align:middle line:84% by far, the most exciting part of teaching these courses 01:09:16.960 --> 01:09:20.140 align:middle line:84% was realizing that people were still 01:09:20.140 --> 01:09:23.229 align:middle line:84% using this infrastructure in various kinds of ways years 01:09:23.229 --> 01:09:24.439 align:middle line:90% after the course ended. 01:09:24.439 --> 01:09:26.920 align:middle line:84% So I think I taught this course in 2013. 01:09:26.920 --> 01:09:30.595 align:middle line:84% And still, in 2015, people were posting on their blogs, 01:09:30.595 --> 01:09:31.720 align:middle line:90% connecting with each other. 01:09:31.720 --> 01:09:33.220 align:middle line:84% I don't know, the equivalent of that 01:09:33.220 --> 01:09:37.569 align:middle line:84% would be, if you're in 18.06 now and it has a Piazza forum, what 01:09:37.569 --> 01:09:40.270 align:middle line:84% if, three years from now, you were inspired to hop back 01:09:40.270 --> 01:09:43.410 align:middle line:84% in there and still-- everyone's looking at me like, good god, 01:09:43.410 --> 01:09:44.660 align:middle line:90% I would never do such a thing. 01:09:44.660 --> 01:09:47.663 align:middle line:84% But you wouldn't do such a thing because you don't own it, 01:09:47.663 --> 01:09:50.080 align:middle line:84% and it's not yours, and you can't take it in the direction 01:09:50.080 --> 01:09:51.163 align:middle line:90% that you're interested in. 01:09:51.163 --> 01:09:53.770 align:middle line:84% But in higher education, if we gave you an infrastructure 01:09:53.770 --> 01:09:56.350 align:middle line:84% that you had some control over, you 01:09:56.350 --> 01:09:57.792 align:middle line:90% might be substantially more-- 01:09:57.792 --> 01:09:59.500 align:middle line:84% I mean, at least the students at the time 01:09:59.500 --> 01:10:07.060 align:middle line:84% were interested in continuing to pursue these kinds of learning 01:10:07.060 --> 01:10:09.310 align:middle line:90% experiences. 01:10:09.310 --> 01:10:14.880 align:middle line:84% But I would say the degree to which people 01:10:14.880 --> 01:10:19.210 align:middle line:84% feel much more individual threat about sharing things online, 01:10:19.210 --> 01:10:22.020 align:middle line:84% especially in really open spaces, 01:10:22.020 --> 01:10:25.410 align:middle line:84% and just the difficulty of the ramp-up time 01:10:25.410 --> 01:10:26.940 align:middle line:84% of building all this infrastructure, 01:10:26.940 --> 01:10:31.620 align:middle line:84% has made it more or less an interesting dead end 01:10:31.620 --> 01:10:34.120 align:middle line:84% and something kind of fun to learn from and explore. 01:10:34.120 --> 01:10:38.590 align:middle line:84% It probably also illustrates more of what you'll read about. 01:10:38.590 --> 01:10:41.670 align:middle line:84% This is an effort in higher education 01:10:41.670 --> 01:10:43.890 align:middle line:90% that basically foundered. 01:10:43.890 --> 01:10:45.780 align:middle line:84% You'll read about other kinds of things 01:10:45.780 --> 01:10:49.420 align:middle line:84% that foundered in different ways in K-12, 01:10:49.420 --> 01:10:52.210 align:middle line:84% or the challenge to make them not founder, for next week. 01:10:52.210 --> 01:10:54.870 align:middle line:84% There's all this amazing learning 01:10:54.870 --> 01:10:59.940 align:middle line:84% that happens in people's informal learning experiences. 01:10:59.940 --> 01:11:03.600 align:middle line:84% Why is it so hard to bring those practices 01:11:03.600 --> 01:11:04.780 align:middle line:90% into school environments? 01:11:04.780 --> 01:11:08.100 align:middle line:84% What is the nature of school environments that makes it 01:11:08.100 --> 01:11:11.970 align:middle line:90% difficult for that to happen? 01:11:11.970 --> 01:11:12.747 align:middle line:90% Good. 01:11:12.747 --> 01:11:14.330 align:middle line:84% I think that's where I got to the end. 01:11:14.330 --> 01:11:17.200 align:middle line:84% What questions do folks have or what-- 01:11:17.200 --> 01:11:22.750 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: My question is, what place does online community 01:11:22.750 --> 01:11:29.428 align:middle line:84% building without the presence of instructors have in this? 01:11:29.428 --> 01:11:30.220 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: Yeah. 01:11:30.220 --> 01:11:38.270 align:middle line:84% If this worked because you owned your own piece of writing-- 01:11:38.270 --> 01:11:41.080 align:middle line:84% I'm teaching this class at a professional school-- 01:11:41.080 --> 01:11:45.430 align:middle line:84% you might find that actually, what motivates you most to write 01:11:45.430 --> 01:11:48.100 align:middle line:84% these assignments is that you found 01:11:48.100 --> 01:11:51.010 align:middle line:84% a bunch of other sixth grade science teachers 01:11:51.010 --> 01:11:52.910 align:middle line:84% that are reading your blog posts, 01:11:52.910 --> 01:11:57.800 align:middle line:84% and you increasingly care less that Justin, 01:11:57.800 --> 01:12:00.430 align:middle line:84% the instructor of this class, is reading your stuff 01:12:00.430 --> 01:12:03.220 align:middle line:84% and more like, hey, I'm getting my ideas out there 01:12:03.220 --> 01:12:06.580 align:middle line:84% and connecting more with other Earth science teachers. 01:12:06.580 --> 01:12:08.740 align:middle line:84% And that, I think, for a lot of-- when 01:12:08.740 --> 01:12:11.940 align:middle line:84% it was most successful, that for people 01:12:11.940 --> 01:12:16.780 align:middle line:84% just felt like work that was super real and urgent. 01:12:16.780 --> 01:12:18.660 align:middle line:84% The other thing is, most of the things-- 01:12:18.660 --> 01:12:19.740 align:middle line:90% I don't know. 01:12:19.740 --> 01:12:25.373 align:middle line:84% When people got responses, there wasn't a whole lot of-- 01:12:25.373 --> 01:12:26.790 align:middle line:84% there was probably some, but there 01:12:26.790 --> 01:12:30.900 align:middle line:84% wasn't a whole lot of, you are required to reply to at least 01:12:30.900 --> 01:12:33.630 align:middle line:90% two people kinds of things. 01:12:33.630 --> 01:12:37.990 align:middle line:84% There was a lot of, people would write blog posts, 01:12:37.990 --> 01:12:41.370 align:middle line:84% but they would write blog posts that tagged 01:12:41.370 --> 01:12:43.930 align:middle line:84% or posted back to someone else's post. 01:12:43.930 --> 01:12:48.150 align:middle line:84% So it was just kind of like a natural conversation that 01:12:48.150 --> 01:12:50.040 align:middle line:90% was happening and unfolding. 01:12:50.040 --> 01:12:52.740 align:middle line:84% Where it was most successful, what 01:12:52.740 --> 01:12:54.810 align:middle line:84% you felt like as an instructor, is 01:12:54.810 --> 01:12:59.550 align:middle line:84% you were just putting some fuel for this fire 01:12:59.550 --> 01:13:00.730 align:middle line:90% to burn on its own. 01:13:00.730 --> 01:13:03.328 align:middle line:84% You're just like, here, check out these things. 01:13:03.328 --> 01:13:05.370 align:middle line:84% But then people would take them in the directions 01:13:05.370 --> 01:13:06.940 align:middle line:84% that they were most interested in and excited about. 01:13:06.940 --> 01:13:08.232 align:middle line:90% Does that answer your question? 01:13:08.232 --> 01:13:11.330 align:middle line:90% 01:13:11.330 --> 01:13:13.337 align:middle line:90% Other thoughts or things that-- 01:13:13.337 --> 01:13:15.170 align:middle line:84% AUDIENCE: How does this play into the Google 01:13:15.170 --> 01:13:18.200 align:middle line:90% Doc that runs this course? 01:13:18.200 --> 01:13:19.340 align:middle line:90% JUSTIN REICH: Huh. 01:13:19.340 --> 01:13:20.960 align:middle line:90% Yeah. 01:13:20.960 --> 01:13:23.480 align:middle line:90% Well, some of it is-- 01:13:23.480 --> 01:13:26.660 align:middle line:84% probably the main lingering piece 01:13:26.660 --> 01:13:29.930 align:middle line:84% is that it's a pain in the ass to show my Canvas 01:13:29.930 --> 01:13:31.230 align:middle line:90% site to someone else. 01:13:31.230 --> 01:13:34.190 align:middle line:84% And one of the main things that I want to do 01:13:34.190 --> 01:13:38.810 align:middle line:84% is, I don't know, in my career of teaching, be able to quickly 01:13:38.810 --> 01:13:41.150 align:middle line:84% to explain to other people how I teach. 01:13:41.150 --> 01:13:44.690 align:middle line:84% So one of the best things about having the whole course live 01:13:44.690 --> 01:13:47.390 align:middle line:84% on a Google Doc is any new professor 01:13:47.390 --> 01:13:49.980 align:middle line:84% who's just starting teaching EdTech and Society, it's like, 01:13:49.980 --> 01:13:51.110 align:middle line:90% here's a whole course. 01:13:51.110 --> 01:13:52.190 align:middle line:84% Take it and-- I mean, they're probably 01:13:52.190 --> 01:13:53.900 align:middle line:84% taking it and shoving it bit by bit 01:13:53.900 --> 01:13:57.470 align:middle line:84% into Canvas, which I've done periodically for some things. 01:13:57.470 --> 01:14:01.647 align:middle line:84% That any of you who want to sign up for my-- 01:14:01.647 --> 01:14:03.980 align:middle line:84% future people who are interested in this class, syllabus 01:14:03.980 --> 01:14:04.850 align:middle line:90% is there. 01:14:04.850 --> 01:14:06.840 align:middle line:84% I mean, it's even got the revision history. 01:14:06.840 --> 01:14:08.220 align:middle line:84% You can not only see-- nobody does that, 01:14:08.220 --> 01:14:09.762 align:middle line:84% but you can not only see what we did. 01:14:09.762 --> 01:14:12.520 align:middle line:84% I mean, I would also say, earlier versions of that-- 01:14:12.520 --> 01:14:17.980 align:middle line:84% when the web was more active in this way, over the summer, 01:14:17.980 --> 01:14:19.630 align:middle line:84% I would post, here are all the changes 01:14:19.630 --> 01:14:22.588 align:middle line:84% that I made to my syllabus and circulate it around the hashtags 01:14:22.588 --> 01:14:24.130 align:middle line:84% or other networks of people that were 01:14:24.130 --> 01:14:25.520 align:middle line:90% active in those conversations. 01:14:25.520 --> 01:14:28.750 align:middle line:84% And people would definitely jump into the syllabus 01:14:28.750 --> 01:14:31.532 align:middle line:84% and add comments and be like, oh, this new book just came out, 01:14:31.532 --> 01:14:33.740 align:middle line:84% or these new resources came out and things like that. 01:14:33.740 --> 01:14:35.980 align:middle line:84% I mean, it existed as, for a period 01:14:35.980 --> 01:14:39.190 align:middle line:84% of time, a much more social document, 01:14:39.190 --> 01:14:42.708 align:middle line:84% again, when there were a lot of educators, 01:14:42.708 --> 01:14:45.250 align:middle line:84% especially people interested in online learning and education 01:14:45.250 --> 01:14:47.170 align:middle line:84% technology, who were pretty active 01:14:47.170 --> 01:14:49.180 align:middle line:90% in those kinds of communities. 01:14:49.180 --> 01:14:51.020 align:middle line:84% And so you could do stuff like that. 01:14:51.020 --> 01:14:53.890 align:middle line:84% Now, it's mostly just a legacy of, editing 01:14:53.890 --> 01:14:56.765 align:middle line:84% that thing is so much easier than editing Canvas. 01:14:56.765 --> 01:14:58.640 align:middle line:84% Anytime I want to change something in Canvas, 01:14:58.640 --> 01:15:01.130 align:middle line:84% I have to do it in three places and click 15 buttons. 01:15:01.130 --> 01:15:03.410 align:middle line:90% The Google Doc, I just edit. 01:15:03.410 --> 01:15:03.910 align:middle line:90% Good. 01:15:03.910 --> 01:15:06.370 align:middle line:84% So that was a little bit in some of these ideas 01:15:06.370 --> 01:15:08.290 align:middle line:84% of peer-guided learning in higher education. 01:15:08.290 --> 01:15:10.848 align:middle line:84% We'll see some more of them in K-12. 01:15:10.848 --> 01:15:13.140 align:middle line:84% I think you're going to read some stuff from Mimi Ito-- 01:15:13.140 --> 01:15:19.510 align:middle line:84% and what else did I make you do for next time?-- 01:15:19.510 --> 01:15:24.370 align:middle line:84% and Mitch Resnick about Scratch, which Scratch 01:15:24.370 --> 01:15:29.190 align:middle line:84% is probably the most successful peer-guided learning environment 01:15:29.190 --> 01:15:30.968 align:middle line:84% which has made its way into K-12 schools. 01:15:30.968 --> 01:15:32.760 align:middle line:84% Although one of the things that we'll learn 01:15:32.760 --> 01:15:35.940 align:middle line:84% is that when it gets there, it kind of gets 01:15:35.940 --> 01:15:38.940 align:middle line:84% schoolified in ways that are horrific to the people who 01:15:38.940 --> 01:15:43.240 align:middle line:84% made it, but more to follow when we discuss that on Monday. 01:15:43.240 --> 01:15:43.740 align:middle line:90% Great. 01:15:43.740 --> 01:15:45.900 align:middle line:84% Have a wonderful rest of your week and weekend, 01:15:45.900 --> 01:15:48.440 align:middle line:90% and I will see you next week. 01:15:48.440 --> 01:16:06.000 align:middle line:90%