There is no doubt that this requires a massive shift for a lot of people. It is being done but this will require a great deal of work to make it universal. The assessment issue is definitely a piece that must be fine tuned. Despite the fact that this idea needs to fine tuned, I believe this model can improve how we educate our students.

Thanks. This is a great resource. I’m sure i’ll be in touch with some questions.

Wow. Thank you for your feed back. In regards to the public and private spheres, you are right that is an issue but in my mind in a connected world where so many could benefit, we should embrace an open society. If we promote the idea of openness with ideas and teach proper media literacy skills for attribution I think we will be doing a lot more good than if we hid our work behind gates. With that in mind, our students are constantly connected, this would become a great platform to teach them about digital citizenship.

You are right about the marketing. If an administration at a school buys in, there is no doubt that I/we would have to help faculty understand the value in such a move. While that may take some effort to help teachers understand, in a world where we are becoming more open (MIT Courseware etc.) rather than not, we need to think ahead to how we should educate our students. This can be done.

In regards to time, there is no doubt that redesigning a curriculum like this is a big task. It cannot be done immediately but if a school is willing to take the time and make a shift over a few years the pros far outweigh the cons.

It will take time to develop the relationships and make the connections to build such a curriculum but once a program like that is developed, the outcomes from this kind of participation will be well worth the time and effort

Privacy is a real issue but if we want to make a difference, providing access to our content, making it connect to the real world, and allowing students to show their work will be important shifts to incorporate into education.

Thanks for bringing these points up. They are definitely ideas that need to be addressed if something like this is to work.

I’ve been teaching graduate students with a model similar to this for a couple years (especially in a course of mine called “Authority and Credibility in Online Communities”). While I recognize this is a very different type of student, I think there are also many commonalities, and from these experiences I personally endorse what you write above.

In my experience, the trickiest part of this sort of class model so far has been negotiating between degrees of “public”, “protected” and “private”, especially as the quality of a student’s work improves. But this can probably be overcome via clever tagging/staging processes to allow for the current status of (and hence standards for evaluation of) a piece of work to be marked and managed and is the topic of a whole separate essay

(Aside: the weakest part of this experience as I implemented it so far has actually been the “connecting to something bigger” component which you write about above — I think this is a very important insight and am planning to try to incorporate this next year.)

I think it is very important when presenting a model like the above to not only justify it with respect to the students and learning, but also with respect to teachers and teaching. The above model drastically changes the role of the teacher, requiring different skills/training and philosophy.

Here’s an anecdote about why I think this is important: when I talked about my class to one of my colleagues in another department she said something to the effect of, “boy that sounds great for students, but I wouldn’t want to be the teacher in such a class! I would never do that myself.”

She had two main categories of worry here. First was that the amount of time involved for the teacher to both “cultivate” and “curate” the community would be immense, especially given that if you are successful there will be really in depth discussions that require lots of your attention and time (even if students are also sharing some of the cultivation burden with you). It becomes an all-consuming flame. It’s a far cry from coming to class, giving your lecture, and going back to your office to grade assignments and write!

Her second worry was related to how the *persistence* of the online interactions would affect teaching. For example, if everything a teacher says is recorded, archived and searchable, some (many?) teachers will feel the need to “be more careful”, for example, treating their responses to student questions more like (time-consuming!) research papers as opposed to one-offs.

In that particular conversation, I was able to tell her about how I personally managed these issues in my own class, but I don’t think I convinced her that the model was generally applicable (and of course, it probably isn’t!). But my main point here is that if a more participatory model is going to achieve widespread adoption, it needs to be “marketed” to teachers (and within universities’ schools of education) from both a pedagogical standpoint *and* from a more practical standpoint of how it will affect their own job and role.

Just to be clear, this is not a criticism of the model, but rather a suggestion for “marketing” it.

P.S. Thanks for tweeting from the conference today. I followed it with interest. I wish I could’ve been there!