 What we want to do is just quickly talk through with Jonathan and how some of the stuff that they've been doing with MOOCs. So Jonathan, just to give us a bit of context with what you've been doing, when did it start? How's it going now? OK, so I think it's important to set out the outset that I don't do a MOOC and never have. And so that's going great. But my background is a photographer. And it's important just to contextualize everything that I've done. My background isn't as an academic or a teacher. It is as a photographer. And I was a fairly successful one in as much as I was living solely by making images and by selling photographs to newspapers and magazines and so on. But over the course of the 15 years that I did that, the business model changed and gradually became fairly broken. And there was a point at which I realized that, in fact, photography was going through a kind of a paradigm shift. And my business model had relied on photographs and paper and a scarce product being sold at a high price. But now I made images. And images are abundant. They can be reproduced at no cost and shipped at no cost. And so my business model had to change. I mean, I've come to recognize this in retrospect now. But that was a really important moment, understanding that, in fact, the photograph does one thing. It's fixed in time. And it's location-specific. Whereas the image, the image is abundant and it's distributed. And it can connect you to other people. And so in 2008, a friend of mine asked me to write some classes for a new course, a new university photography course. And I said, I would do it. But I couldn't write the same classes that I'd learnt as a student, because they'd been written in the 70s or whatever. And it would be entirely disingenuous to hold up these famous people that I'd photographed that represented a business model that changed completely and then to try and sell that. So I said, yeah, I'll write the classes. But it has to address these issues. It has to address the fact that it's unclear as to what a 21st century photographer is when everyone has a camera and the means to publish. What is it that makes a professional different? And so that was the basis for writing the classes. Now, I had to learn how to teach pretty quickly. And I had to learn what to teach pretty quickly. And so it made sense to stick the class on a blog, to ask the big difficult questions publicly, and then seek out answers from whoever had them. I mean, for instance, this idea about rethinking your product, that's what I had to do as a photographer. What was my product when it couldn't be photographs anymore? When I made images now. That was something that the science fiction writer Corey Dottoro helped me to come to an understanding of. When he shared his business model, one of his business models, he was giving away e-books, e-versions of his book for free, and still selling hard copy books as well. And he was making a healthy living at this. And he shared that idea of versioning out what we do, rethinking what we do with me. And I trialled it as a photographer. And it was quite successful. So we unpicked things like that in the classes. That was the beginnings of a class called Picturing the Body, known as PickBod now by its Twitter hashtag. And it was something we went on to develop and explore even further in another class called Photography and Narrative, which is known now by its hashtag, which is phonar. Just to summarize, you took your experiences as a photographer where the business model was about allowing more openness to what you were doing as a photographer, gave you greater reach and greater impact, and to mirror that in an education setting. Yes, absolutely. Yes, that was it. So what I did was I realized that the images would connect me to people using the internet, enable me to use the image to connect to people who I could reach. It was a very discerning way of reaching people who would be most interested in other versions of my product. And so I could use the image to reach out to distributed geeks, let's say, who would then come to me to buy this other version of the product. Let's say the print, for instance. So a super fan of Heath Ledger, would come to me to buy another version of the product. They'd buy the signed print. So yes, that was something that enabled me to do. Now coming to teaching, when I put it on the blog, the first thing that people said was, if you give this away for free, then no one's going to buy it. And I had to then say, but this is similar to my photography, my journey as a photographer. In fact, the product isn't the knowledge. You can give that away for free. The product is the learning experience. And what giving away the knowledge does, if you will, is it connects all those people. And you have this sort of very networked experience with a huge amount of added value and added opportunities for the people who bought the version which is to sit in the room, the premium version. So just when thinking about what you've got, a version of what you want to achieve, in terms of the teaching design, what was your starting point with? Was the University of VLE ever in the picture? Or was it you wanted to start clean piece of paper from scratch? And how did you get from that to where you are now? Well, I realized very quickly that any barrier to entry would stop most people engaging. Then there are a number of barriers to entry. One was so with regard to the University VLE. One was that you had to pay £27,000 to get access to that. So that narrowed down the class quite quickly and substantially to whatever it is, 40, 17-year-olds or 40, 18-year-olds in the room. So that really wasn't appropriate. And similarly, every time I considered a space or a different way of teaching or speaking, I have to think, is this going to be a barrier to entry? So it's not using academic language a lot of the time. So that anyone can engage with it, not using discipline-specific language so that people could engage with it. Using a blog that people didn't have to sign up to to engage with, that was important so that people would drop by and drop in. And of course, there were other reasons as well for using. I was using Blogger at the time. That's the first one I did. I had no money. Had no money at all, no resources. And so everything had to be free. But what this meant, and I've realized this afterwards, one of the strengths was that I had no money. I couldn't afford to build an entirely new network. I had to go to the networks that were already established. And those networks happened to be really well populated. And so it meant going to Twitter, going to Flickr, going to Vimeo, going to SoundCloud, all those spaces where the fish were already swimming, as it were, and go in there and say, who's interested in this class? Who's interested in this subject area? Rather than having them to change their existing social media behaviors in order to do something entirely different, I mean, that's, I've come to understand now, that's largely unsustainable. Don't build a new version of Facebook at university. Use Facebook. It's really good at being Facebook. So with these spaces as a photographer, were you already present on Flickr, present on Vimeo? Were any of these new spaces for you? It was all new spaces. I hadn't even, I'd never had a blog. I had to learn from scratch. And so I go back now, and I was quite open about it. I didn't know how to teach. I needed to learn as quickly as possible. I asked for help. I didn't know how to, I didn't know what to teach. There were no answers. The book's not been written yet on what it is to be a 21st century visual storyteller. So if you go back to that first, it is one blog post for the entire course. The entire course just gets, the entire post is longer and longer and longer, with the comments just getting longer and longer. It's acutely embarrassing. But then that's just the nature of learning openly. It is, people have been nothing but forgiving to me. Every time I've asked for help, people have come out and helped. No one's ever said, well, that's rubbish what you did there. People have always been very generous and always sort of helped. Sitting next to Alan Avine, who continues to help me constantly. And I hope I feed back to him. The point was, no, I'd never blogged. I'd never used any of these spaces before. So I came as a learner. I came as a peer learner. And I learned from my students who were using these spaces and they could tell me how to navigate them. I mean, that wasn't actually a bad thing in itself. Yeah, it's probably at this point we're pulling in Alan. So around 2008, 2009, was that when DS106 started? Actually, it was 2010. 2010, right. So that was Jim Grimm's creation at University of Mary Washington. I had an interest in this idea of digital storytelling. I went to a conference first on it in the 90s when it was really a film-based being popularized very well by the Center for Digital Storytelling. A lot about personal narrative and people learning how to craft a story and then present it in digital form. And so I was always interested because I've long had an interest in the platform of the web as means of expression and publishing. And the idea that a story on the web was innately different from a story in sound or in video because of the affordances of the web to link to cross-media. There's people like Henry Jenkins who've been researching the idea of trans-media storytelling. And Jim Grimm took this course at the University of Mary Washington. It is on the books as a computer science class as digital storytelling. It had been taught in a classroom by a teacher with lectures in a book and students doing video. And when Jim took it on in January of 2010, he had this idea of putting the students in the web to do their work but also with the idea of importance of this notion about students learning to be able to create their own digital space. So they would have to register web domains, not use anything the university provided and learn not only the things about publishing their work but also what it took to install WordPress, to manage things, to have control over that digital space. And I was interested, among other people, I followed what they were doing because the students were publishing their work in the open. Jim was publishing his class in the open and you could be part of it as an observer. And that was very interesting. And then in October of 2010, someone asked him, and this was in the context of the first MOOC, the CCK08 that George Siemens and Stevens founded, the idea about having a network that participate in the course. So we were aware and influenced by that but the idea of DS106 in January 2010 being something that people not registered in the course could participate in, they would set up their own blogs and have their content feed into the central course. And the parallel is I think that are very important and why I got very interested in what Jonathan was doing. Different sort of approaches to platforms but similar in the idea that the students who paid for the class and had the classroom experience, you weren't trying to replicate that same experience for the open participants. And at the same time what the open participants did was not the same as the students were doing but there was somewhat of an overlap. So you benefit by having people from the outside participate, react, communicate, maybe even collaborate with these students but they definitely had a different experience. And to me that's what makes what we're doing not really the MOOC-like thing where you're trying to have everybody go through and get the same carbon copy experience. Something that's quite interesting that's kind of a thread between these is the literacies that people are developing as they go along. So Jonathan you were picking this, you were learning as you were going along and I imagine a lot of your students are learning as they're going along. It's a course after all they should be learning that they're learning about the kind of digital presence being online, publishing stuff online. Is that all kind of integrated into the course in terms of support? In terms of support, it's kind of fundamental and it's grown to be fundamental. We've talked about digital photography for years but we haven't actually thought about what that means. We've always talked about what it does. It means a digital camera but to actually discuss what the image means we've never really done that. And so yes, now the course is much more now about visual literacy and about digital fluency. And so yes, it's about having something to say, being able to say it very clearly but then amongst all the digital noise it's about being heard. And that's the bit about the digital fluency. So is it supported in a sort of academic sense? Yes, it's now part of the fabric of the course. We have to learn how to use these spaces and how to use and navigate through these spaces, these digital spaces. We also sort of think about what it is to be a sort of digital citizen as well. I suppose you get this question quite often. How much of an administration overhead is it to run the course in the way you have? Administration overhead. Okay, so yeah, we should clarify, exactly me opening up by saying I don't run a MOOC. So mine is a regular class which sits within a closed undergraduate course, photography course. It lasts for 10 weeks. But as Alan described, there is a version of the experience that you can have by joining via the blog, submitting your pictures, listening to the lectures. Crucially, one of the crucial things is tweeting your notes. So if people are listening now and I'm not making sense, if you tweet your questions, if we haven't established a hashtag, so I guess maybe you can establish your hashtag afterwards. Because I'm listening in. I'm listening in now just as the contributors are to phonar. After we've recorded a lecture, they listen in very often and they'll actually respond to the notes and the comments that people put as they listen to the lectures. And so I'll do that now. I'll try and answer questions now if people have them. But I have gone and lost my thread. But if I could jump in. I mean, Jonathan downplays his not being an academic, but his intuition is so perfect for this about how people engage. And the idea, the Unmook idea that it's not this box, that's a course, that is an entire experience, that there's this whole cultural and social framework that builds around it, that means human to human connection and the way we interact with each other, which you can't package. You can't plan. You can set up. So in DS106, we don't prescribe, so much the digital classes and learning ends up, like Jonathan describes, focusing on the tools. And it becomes so minute and uninteresting. And the end product. And students come in with, I refer to it as like an assignment mindset. They need to produce something that's polished and that's what they chuck in the box. And what we really want to encourage is to people to sort of share their process and share the thinking behind the media, things that they create and create stuff that's bad. So we have sort of the same philosophy about, we don't come off as teachers into this class as being perfect. So we mess up in public and students see that and they realize, I don't have to be perfect and I can try something new that doesn't have to be perfect and it's okay. And then they get the support of the community around them. So that community building thing. And even this idea, this word, we always talk about building communities. You don't really build communities, they happen. And they don't happen accidentally, they happen in some nexus of place, whether it's a cafe or a park. But they don't always happen where you build your nice shiny course MOOC box. No, and those communities as well have become the probably the most valuable aspect of our entire course. Currently there are still only two open classes within the degree program. But you know, the most people we've had come to one 10 week iteration is over 35,000. Now that's 35, the compound network opportunities from that many people coming to look at your work and listen to the class with you over 10 weeks is phenomenal. And as you say, you can build those, you can put the things in place to help those networks build. But I think that one of the most valuable things that people can now draw from some of the stuff that we've done is to adapt and adopt, adapt or adopt some of the things that we've done because they can make less mistakes. But don't want people to go away thinking that what we do, even though I've sort of described it as learning how to teach and learning what to teach, that it lacks rigor or any sort of sustained academic engagement because it doesn't. I think it is fairly rigorous. And we work really, really hard to make sure that the quality is the very best that we can make it. I mean, I think we should rethink what the product is as an education institution, as educators. I can't see a reason for not teaching this way. It's so valuable. It enriches the learning experience so much. It repositions what we do. And actually, it doesn't actually cost that much at all. It just kind of makes sense. I mean, we're talking about open and connected teaching and learning here. I'm not going to use the word MOOC because mine isn't distance learning on an industrial scale, which is what I see when I see most MOOCs. I think that actually works out to D Laus, I think, if we're going to start. But what I'm saying is that to actually think that the class isn't already connected is a kind of a mistake because the class is connected. The students are all on Facebook. They're all on Twitter. They're all on all those. So the class is connected. The only person at this point who isn't connected is the teacher. And so where's the sense in that? If the teacher just connects to this network, then they can augment and enrich the experience, not only of learning, but actually of teaching as well. I've learned how to teach, and I'm learning how to teach from people that are really into this. And they're really good teachers. It's accelerated how I've learned to do what I do. I don't know, 100 fold, it must be. And so it seems to me that there kind of isn't an option. There isn't an option for photographers anymore. The old business model is broken. The product is very, very different now. If you want to operate as a visual storyteller in the 21st century, then you have to rethink what your skill sets are and what your values are as a supplier. And so I think it's much the same for educators that we have to rethink what we are. And we're in a great position to do this. The bricks and mortar experience is very expensive to run, but it's marvelous. It's great. It's what students want to go to college for. There is no reason why you can't have this virtual version as well, enriching their on-site experience. It really is a win-win, virtuous circle, whatever you want to describe it as. I mean, Jonathan's parallel example of his recognition of how his business model for photography is not adaptable to the way technology and culture are going, MOOCs get expensive largely because of this reliance on high production video. I mean, that's where those big costs are. That's why they're getting into these hundreds of thousands of dollars. There's a lot being put into these high production videos. And that's not really changing much of the methodology of the teaching. That's one of those transference of what is done inside the classroom to going on the web. And if people are sparking up their Twitter tweet decks or whatever they use, if you do a search on the hashtag phonar, then the reason I'm not with you today is because I had to teach my phonar class this morning. And Alan Carney flew over from America just to attend our phonar class in person. That is the only reason I am in the UK, Jonathan. You know that. What's he doing here today? You got it. I'm soaking up the sunshine. And if you do do a search on phonar right now, then you should see the echoes of today's class. So today, we will have listened to an interview that I did this morning with an artist called Sarah Davidman. And with the founder of the Path Charlotte Institute in Bangladesh, which I did last week, he's gone back to Bangladesh. And so you should see echoes of the tweets, the comments, and the discussion there. If you scroll through that, I hope so anyway. But if you tweet now, I have been tweeting. And hopefully, I'm responding to it. And Alan is responding to your comments and questions. That was a bit better. Yeah, that was different. We've asked people to tweet some questions. So we do have some questions. Has anyone got any questions right now that they'd like to ask? There should be. Who's here? There's Nina. Can you guys hear us? Jonathan and? Loud and clear. We're here. Can you hear Jonathan? Can Jonathan hear? He sums that up, but we can't hear you. The problem there. So are there any questions? Stuns, silence. I've got a question. And that is? Sorry. Hi, Jonathan. Adam Warren from Southampton. My question is, does your model only work for particular disciplines? So for example, how would it work with hotel management or surgery or something? I hope that's perhaps a realistic example. Hi, can you hear me? Yeah. You know, that's something that we have been thinking about constantly. That's where the really interesting future of this lies, I think, is pushing it out beyond digital storytelling into other areas. I mean, surgery, no. I think I'd still go with a dentist or a doctor that had attended bricks and mortar institution and had gone through the regular system. But hotel management, I'll be honest, I haven't thought about it. I haven't thought about it. So asking me to do it on the fly, I'm probably going to do a bad job of it. I have begun to think about how it might apply to a maths course, or an English literature course, or an English language course, or perhaps even a science course. Then I think that's really interesting where you start to push out into the audience stroke community that are attending the class and ask questions of them as both a learner and as both a teacher and a learner. So the short answer is, I think it's absolutely not only applicable to photography. If we just started this out, I think if we just started out wanting to write an open and connected class, I don't think we would have started with photography. We might have looked at a storytelling class, but I don't think we'd have started with photography. So yeah, I think there are lots of things that other people can adapt and adopt, and I hope they do. Does that answer that question, or is that just a riff? No, that's fine. We have a question via Twitter, and that was, who owns the content? So is it you, or is it the students? Yes, I tried to answer that. Or I tried to answer one question. So well, I'm very clear about this. I write the course. Everything that I write is licensed to CCBY, so that it's there specifically to be adapted and adopted. But over the course of the class and each iteration, the students feed in, other lecturers chip in, and it moves beyond anything that I originally authored. And so who owns it? And I guess we all own it. Is there another question that's buried within that ownership question? One of wanting, who, if you own it, do you get to sell it or something like that? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, that's Helena Gillespie. I guess that's my question. There is something probably hidden within there is, I guess I'm asking you, there've been any problems about that, because my campus-based students, we do various things, and they're blogging at the moment. And one of the things that they're getting concerned about is who's going to read their blog and what I'm going to do with it? And I think it's partly unfamiliar, these are first years, unfamiliarity with the medium that's making them nervous. But because there is this kind of hype in the media about young people and digital content and digital identities and, you know, somebody out there on the internet is watching them. I just wondered whether those two things had come up against each other in kind of unhelpful ways or whether students feel comfortable in sharing and sharing ownership of materials in the same way that you and I might do as educators. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does make sense, yes. Yeah, there definitely isn't a silver bullet answer, and I think one has to take each case by case. Some students really are reluctant to share stuff, and you can always make blogs closed or they can choose to not blog, if that's the case. But, you know, on this idea of navigating these online social spaces, if we will, you know, what better place to learn about that than at school with a teacher? You know, I want my kids to learn this as a part of their learning experience. You know, this was my point about, which I made really badly, about people saying they teach digital photography where they're not teaching about making photographs in the image in digital spaces. I see it as part of my job, my role, to take them by the hand and take them through these digital spaces, to show them what is or isn't appropriate to share, to discuss in a safe, relatively safe environment why perhaps it isn't appropriate to share that in this space, or how to deal with that very, very negative response that you received through that work, or the attack that I got in the press. We had one class where the students became very territorial when someone wrote an article that was critical of me, and I said, you know what, this is, you can choose to jump on the comments section and start attacking these people back, or someone gave me some great advice though some time ago, and they said, if you are attacked, are there only two things that you do? One of them is that you completely ignore this person. You do not shine your spotlight on them. Or the other thing is that you befriend them and you are completely nice to them. Now, I passed that lesson on because it was really valuable to me to learn that. I was really struggling to cope with the attacks that I was receiving. And it turned into a really valuable lesson for the students. So, we wouldn't have had that had I not been criticised publicly and had the students not been in that social space. Okay, thank you very much. So, are there any more questions before we close? No, okay, lovely. Okay, well, thank you very much. That was really innovative, thank you.