 Justin Reich has been a longtime Berkman Center community member as a fellow. He's been around here for five years or so. And up until recently was also a Harvard X fellow working here at the University. But his most recent news that is as of two days ago, he's now the executive director of the PK12 initiative at MIT, which is really exciting. He's here to talk to us about the web we want and the ed we want, which I love as a reference to Neil Dash's talk at this very same series about a year or two ago. So, welcome Justin. Great, and thanks everybody for being here and welcome to people coming in. Please help people come in as they go along. Yeah, so my name is Justin Reich. My background is in education. After college, I taught wilderness medicine. I taught lifeguarding. I was a high school history teacher. I went to the Graduate School of Education here. I study how social media using K-12 settings. I've spent the last two years working on Harvard X and MOOCs and online learning. I'm super excited as of yesterday. I now work at MIT. I'll be working really closely with the folks who introduced themselves as part of the Woodrow Wilson Academy for teaching and learning, supporting their work and developing a new form of teacher education. And I taught a class at the Graduate School of Education this fall, which some of you were members of, called Massive, the Future of Learning at Scale, which was about large-scale learning environments with many, many students and few experts to guide them. Almost every, you know, there have been other times I've been lucky enough to talk at Berkman, in which I've had, at least I've tried to have original or novel things to say. Almost everything that I'm going to say here is derivative of someone else's work. I feel like this talk is, like, really just sort of pulling together interesting things that other people have said and trying to tie them together. So I want to try to make sure I'm good about granting credit to all of those folks as we're going along. But I would say a lot of what I want to do in this talk is make a connection to a set of arguments that a number of people around here and in what we might call the indie web community have been making about the trajectory of the internet in general and describing how some of those trajectories, parallels, things that are happening in education and how ways towards a better future with an internet in general might look really closely to ways towards the better use of an internet in education as general. So trying to link those two things together. So the web we want and the ad we want. So I tweeted out a couple of days ago, sorry if you missed it on Twitter, some homework assignments for people to do. It's fine if you didn't do them. There will not in fact be a quiz, but a couple of great reference points to go back to would be a talk that Anil Dash gave here a couple of years ago called The Web We Lost, which is very similar to an article that David Weinberger very conveniently just wrote like a week or two ago in The Atlantic called The Internet That Was. And the argument that these gentlemen make sort of looks something like this. So they basically posit a kind of golden age of the web somewhere around 2002, 2003, where the internet has this wonderfully open architecture, where bits without discrimination sort of travel freely between people. It has always been possible for individual people to create spaces on the internet that they can use to coordinate and communicate with other people that a lot of the sort of traditional arbiters of who got listened to and who got amplified didn't exist in this new space. And then you know somewhere around the late 90s, early 2000s, there are a whole series of technologies that made it much easier for non-programmers to be able to participate in this same community. And so Live Journal is sort of one of the early blogging platforms was one of the kind of archetypal spaces in this world where it was really pretty easy for anyone to get online. You know, Berkman's own blogs.law.harvard.edu, their own sort of blogging platform made it very easy for people to be publishers, for people to be able to connect to other people, to read other people's work, to amplify their voices, to create the networks they wanted to. Up in the right is my own with my wife little contribution to this world, you know, scooterfire.wordpress.com, the adventures of Justin and Elsa. And I would say the sort of core of the, you know, which is this like weird little travelogue that we made to tell people about the kinds of things we did when we were fun and young and didn't have kids and so forth. You know, sort of one way to summarize the argument is that kind of like Facebook comes and through sort of, you know, network effects and kind of convenience and hegemony kind of obliterates that culture. Well there's a couple of ways of thinking about it. If you read the Atlantic article that David Weinberger, who's a much longer time Berkman fellow wrote, the one call out quote they have, like the one sentence that they pull out from the whole article, is in many ways Facebook fulfilled the dream of blogging. That's not exactly what David, like I bet if you said, David, which sentence would you like pulled out from that article? That's probably not the one that he would have chosen. Facebook fulfilled the dream of blogging in that it made certain kinds of activities much, much easier. But those came at the cost of turning over the control of publication, of dissemination, of filtering, of moderating over to this corporate entity for whom at least a significant portion of their fiduciary interests have to do with selling advertisements. A better sentence might, the one that maybe he would have pulled out might have been something like the blogosphere did not scale. I believe that problem could have been solved, but then Facebook happened. That to me is kind of like a one sentence summary of the web we lost. So there are a whole bunch of other people in education who have been writing, who have been telling a very similar kind of story. And the analogy is if you're going to replace blogs, you might replace them with tilde spaces. So for folks who are on university, online systems, sort of in the 90s or 2000s, a pretty common kind of, like one of these weird conventions that comes up, it's entirely possible that someone here at Berkman invented this convention at some point, was you'd have www.virginia.edu backslash tilde and then Justin Reich or whoever else it would be. There's a, you know, one of the people who I'm drawing from here is a guy named Jim Groom who did some great digging of these kind of university tilde spaces. And the university tilde spaces were idiosyncratic. They were not customized. You know, sometimes they were beautiful. Sometimes they were ugly. They were always quirky. They were always kind of weird. But what they did was they gave the capacity for individual students and faculty members and groups and whoever else to kind of carve out and own their little piece of the web and to control that little piece of the web. If these slides are sent around, there's a great blog post from Jim Groom who's at the University of Mary Washington who has some more examples of these kind of tilde spaces. And Jim Groom and Alan Levine are two of the people for whom on the sort of education part of this talk I'm kind of most drawing on their ideas. But you know, but the argument basically kind of is the same that we had these really cool idiosyncratic individually produced tilde spaces and then Blackboard came. You know, and you could say that like in many ways Blackboard fulfilled the dream of the university. You know, but again that's probably not quite, you know, learning management systems offered a kind of scalability, offered an ease of use of doing some kinds of things that were powerful. You know, but another way to frame things was that tilde spaces did not scale. It's a problem that could have been solved but then Blackboard happened. Jim Groom sort of calls the last decade, the lost decade of higher education education technology. The lost decade of higher education IT. Like we basically went down this sort of pathway with learning management systems. You know, which a whole bunch of us hope we look back and go, man, wow, wasn't that a dead end? That was really the wrong way to go. Now certainly the problem that Blackboard was solving, the extraordinary complexity of building spaces on the web was a real problem. Here's another document that Jim Groom pulls up which is a two-page document on web-create creation at SUNY Oneata and you probably can't read it but there are instructions of things like create all HTML directories, all HTML files should be named with the extension .html. You know, you have to sort of like run this little bit of shell script in order to set everything to read access and so forth. And of course as soon as you kind of mention shell script you've got 95% of your higher education audience who's like, well, that's not really for me. So if that kind of accessibility and ease of use was a problem, what came to replace it also came with a serious set of problems. So here's the sort of eyesight page that Harvard, the Graduate School of Education gave me last year when starting my course and you could essentially replace this page with like virtually any other course that I got at the Harvard Graduate School of Education because all of them use the same template from a learning management system regardless of whether you're teaching introductory statistics or critical race theory, whether you have a lecture class with 200 people or a seminar with four, you'll get the same stamping and there's sort of three features of it that I think are really important. The first is that it's stamped. The first is that everyone starts with a template. You start with the exact same template that makes a series of decisions for you that sort of sets a frame of reference for you that allows you to avoid thinking about a whole series of questions and sort of gives you answers to questions that maybe you should be asking. All of it is controlled by the university. So when I use a learning management system, I say to my students, students, you know, get off of whatever you were doing on the internet and come into my space and leave all of your stuff in my space and all of the places that I create for you to leave it in the ways that I create and 99% of this is something like I'm going to ask you a question that I came up with Wednesday night before class and you're going to give me 67 of the exact same answers to this question and you're not really happy to be answering the question and I'm not really happy to be reading them but here we are doing this together. In the unlikely event that there is sort of kernels of wisdom and genius that are produced there, they live inside this locked walled garden that other folks can't get access to and then in most cases, three to six months after the course runs or 12 to 18 months after the course runs, it's all destroyed. It's all wiped clean to make room for the next group of people. I mean that's a sort of extraordinary statement to make to students. We want you to create an intellectual effort that we promise you will delete and it will be gone. What kind of intellectual effort do we expect people to expend on something that we tell them will no longer exist? But the one thing that it does really well is sort of serve this coordination function. The thing that these learning management systems do really effectively is you've got a whole bunch of people in class and you want those people to interact with each other and you want those ideas to interact with each other and these walled gardens create opportunities for all of this to happen. Probably as most of us know from the almost everyone who gives the kind of the web we lost talk has to do the kind of perfunctory but I also use Facebook part of their talk in which I say something like yes, I use Facebook and in fact I no longer maintain the adventures of Elsa and Justin and instead I take little quips about my kids which are not nearly as interesting as what the adventurous parts were and I use Facebook and all my friends can relatively easily see them and they get disseminated and so forth and that coordination function is fulfilled by these walled gardens but at all of these other kinds of costs. So a big thing that I've been interested in and we'll try to talk about for no more than 10 minutes so we can get on to talking with one another is sort of what would systems look like that allowed us to have that kind of coordination that learning management systems provide but without being stamped, without being controlled being destroyed unless students want them to be destroyed and I tried to get a sort of tweet length, you know, sort of summary of what those systems looks like and here's one attempt at that but the core idea is that students should own their means of production and that the main function of technology is to connect students to each other and to each other's work but while maintaining student ownership of their online identity and their online creations is kind of the central principle organizing the learning environments that I want to create. So this was the official tweet of this talk if you want the 140 character version of it. So I taught this class called T509 massive.org and tried to create a technological infrastructure that would enact some of these values that would try to enact parts of the ed that we want. This is what the home page looked like. When the talky talky part is over, we can actually go in and look around and of course all of you on your phones or whatever else are free to jump on to T509massive.org and look around and see what's there but hopefully it looks just on the face of it kind of less canned less generic less less stamped than other things So here's the basic philosophy of the learning environment every student should be able to create their own online presence. They should be able to create that online presence, ideally using any of the tools that they were using already. So if people communicate to the world on their own blog, they should be able to keep doing that. If people use Twitter if people use Instagram, if people use whatever else, if they want to develop new capacities and want to learn how to start a blog or learn how to start a Twitter account or other kinds of things, I should help them do that. But the ideal set of circumstances is that people have spaces where they're doing thinking and sharing and we ask them to continue to do that thinking and sharing and the signature function of the T509 website the sort of learning environment that we're creating is it's meant to syndicate and pull all those things together and calls this the syndication bus. And the sort of most simple idea is that basically when students create some kind of contribution that somehow gets marked as relevant to the class, then a copy of that all gets drawn into the syndication bus. That they get to keep all their stuff on their own accounts and the ideal circumstances on their own servers or whatever else and we pull a copy of that into this central environment and that's what lets everybody see things and coordinate and so forth. So the web page is broken up into a series of different sections one of the most important sections are called hubs and the main hub is called the flow and the idea of the flow is that everything that students produce that gets somehow marked through a hashtag or through an RSS subscription as relevant to this class all gets brought into the flow so I don't know how many items that have been syndicated there now thousands from the 50 students that we had this fall but pretty much every piece of production that they did beforehand or that they did afterwards that they decided to keep contributing was brought into this actually the first thing that you see there when I took the screenshot is from Rachel Roberts who finished her responsibilities to this class in December but is still finding this a meaningful place to communicate and connect with other people in addition to the flow of everything there are also hubs for different kinds of production so there's a blog hub which is meant to grab everyone's long form writing and pull it together there's a Twitter flow which is meant to grab everyone's tweeting and so forth and pull it into the same place and to let people do that so that is basically this kind of reverse chronological order no filtering if you put it up there it'll go up there first kind of thing and then as an instructor I kind of take the prerogative to say actually there's some things that are produced every week that I think are worthy of special attention and so I'll make those spotlight posts and these are things that either show up in the special spotlight hub or they show up on the home page and some other things like that are basically grabbing copies of people's material and putting them in a space where other folks can see them so that students still own their work and some of the things that I would spotlight or the teaching team would spotlight would be like the sort of weekly this is what you're supposed to do post but other things were particularly prerogative particularly thoughtful contributions that folks made so what did I ask them to do in this space I think this general architecture has applications for lots of different kinds of courses I think this is a legitimate alternative to the wall garden LMS and lots of different kinds of courses what I specifically asked students to do may end up being more particular to certain kinds of courses but the class that I taught Massive the future of learning a lot of it is about independent learning and so the central assignment of this part of the class is basically your responsibility the course of the semester is to participate in our online network and I don't want to tell you exactly how to do that because as soon as I start telling people exactly what to do they do the exact same thing and then it gets kind of boring and stale but actually not telling you what to do is super hard both for me and for students so the best we came up with was there were sort of three guidelines to your participation you had to be doing stuff that somehow advanced your own learning you had to be doing stuff that somehow advanced your own learning community together so you have a responsibility to help your other classmates have a better learning experience they would have otherwise and then you somehow have to make a contribution to some kind of wider learning community and that could just be the world generically in a professional school there are lots of people who had professional commitments to English teachers who had professional commitments to the schools they worked at and those folks might have been particularly targeted at trying to serve those communities and I basically say over the course of the semester what you would like that participation to look like and how you would like it to be evaluated and sort of create a rubric for yourself of what that participation might look like and over the course of the semester we'll try to give you some feedback on that and you can give a grade for yourself on that at the end of the class we might give you a grade on that at the end of the class but the idea is that we want you to sort of design your own participation within the space but design it in a way that you have some tools to hold yourself accountable so all kinds of amazing emergent practices evolve when you do that there was a whole group of students who decided that they were going to have a Twitter chat about the readings every Tuesday night before class on Wednesday so a voluntary group of students would all get together and they would get on Twitter and they would sort of tweet back and forth their ideas about the readings it was awesome for me to have a kind of record of their conversations on Wednesday morning before heading into class on Wednesday evening that class was not huge but it was a little bit large it had sort of 40 or 50 people in it one of the pieces of feedback that I hadn't anticipated but was echoed throughout was that having this online learning community gave people an entree to talk to each other face to face so I taught in the fall people come from all over the world they don't really know each other they're trying to get to know each other but if someone tweets out like I think Justin's article was dumb now they're talking to each other and their friends and so forth so they're good things like that that emerge I would say there are probably there are lots of problems with what I've described or with any pedagogical environment but let me talk about two in particular that are worth wrestling with and thinking about and the first is what I would call the curse of the familiar all virtually everyone has very strong feelings visceral feelings about what teaching and learning environment should look like and when you deviate from those expected norms you can create very strong reactions in people ranging from antipathy to confusion to anxiety especially if you're working with a series of high performing students who have to do pretty well in the conventional system to find themselves at the Harvard ed school at some point asking them to do different things is hard asking them to develop new kinds of technical capacity can take an enormous amount of time if we want to take seriously the idea that I want every student to own their own space on the web so I have to teach you an introduction to HTML my course isn't about an introduction to HTML I don't want to teach you an introduction to writing I want to be able to start somewhere and move on from that but especially if I have a commitment to letting people participate relatively equitably or at least have a kind of equitable foundation then it takes an enormous amount of time both to give people the kind of skill set to be able to participate and then you know essentially to kind of work through all the emotional feelings that we have and we're asked to learn in a way that we haven't learned before so that's some of those things I actually feel pretty good about inducing that kind of confusion there are lots of ways where you might say like you know a sort of common refrain is kind of we just want technology to get out of the way so we can do whatever it is that we're going to do but there are actually maybe other circumstances where we say actually we would really like technology to be in the way we would really like to be sort of tripping and stumbling over technology you know saying like what is this thing and how is it shaping our learning experience how is it shaping our relationships with each other why is it here and what are we doing with it and how do we be conscientious about that it's certainly true that we ought to be doing that in classes that are called things like massive the future of learning but I think it may be true that we should do that in other settings the other sort of big piece that I think a lot about is what you might call sort of like inequitable vulnerability so I'm pretty comfortable in a professional school of education asking students to do at least some fraction of their thinking out loud in public because I think that's a good practice for educators to learn about I think there's plenty of evidence that there are lots of educators who find that really enriching and rewarding and helpful to have a kind of global faculty lounge I could imagine lots of circumstances and the sort of one alternative view is something like well we shouldn't have students thinking out loud in public because they might do something wrong and therefore that could bring embarrassment to them that could bring embarrassment to us and so we should not do that but they should be able to do that after they leave us which to me is kind of a cop out like if we're going to be doing sort of risky challenging things with people like do risky challenging things with me around when like we have a commitment to each other and I can help you and we can figure this out together but all of this stuff I was teaching in the fall kind of when Gamergate and other things were blowing up and it became immediately very powerfully viscerally clear to me that the kind of people experienced were inequitable that if someone were to get embarrassed if something were to blow up it would blow up differently for women for people of color for people in vulnerable circumstances and it would for me living life on kind of the easiest difficulty setting and so and that I know much less about how to get around that especially in this particular context where it's very easy to describe sort of all of the terrible things that might hypothetically happen to you if you share your thinking out loud with the world it's actually much harder to describe people to benefits without having them experiencing it for some time so if you sort of start a conversation about learning online and in public there are these weird nebulous things which maybe you might experience if you do it for a while and hear all these sort of high profile terrible things that might happen in the introduction to try to get people into a community with and so so that was sort of one of the things that I in elegantly wrestled with within this by closing I should say here's a couple of parting thoughts before we turn to more of a conversation one is that the system that I built was built on WordPress it was built with a plugin called Feed WordPress it's not just a plugin it's a web application it's a tool that helps you build your organization it's a tool that helps you build this kind of infrastructure it requires some technological skill but not necessarily if you can manage a WordPress site you can probably figure it out but there are definitely organizations and nonprofits and for-profits out there who are trying to build of domain of one's own. And the idea was that every freshman at the University of Mary Washington would get their own domain. They would get their own URL, they would get their own server space. We would say, as we induct you into this community of learners, like you should have your own space to create a digital portfolio to communicate with each others. And University of Mary Washington said, and the people doing it said, this is such a fabulous idea. We actually ought to be able to build this infrastructure so it's sort of turnkey and anyone can do this. So Davidson College, a small liberal arts college outside of Charlotte is one of the folks who's just signed on to reclaim hosting. There are plenty of other places as well where basic, you know, your freshman package is, you know, you get an email, you get a dorm room, you get like sheets for the extra long bed, and you get a URL, which I think is great. There's another sort of group of folks coming out of the IndieWeb community that have built a platform called Known. And Known is a publishing platform that's sort of, the way I think about it is instead of having one, it's a Tumblr site that instead of having one published button, it has as many as you want to as many different places as you want. So you can say for this post, publish this to Twitter, publish this to Facebook, publish this to the discussion group in my learning management system that's sort of in that walled garden, publish this to my own blog, publish this to wherever else, and you can with any post choose amongst all of those different things. So you could say, man, this thing that I wrote that was due for an assignment is totally awesome. I'm gonna send this into the closed part of the class when I'm gonna send it to the open part, it would be really great for my friends. So I'm gonna send it to the Facebook or it would be really great for my working community. So I'll send it to Twitter or whatever else. I'm almost positive that I'm gonna replace a fair amount of the infrastructure that I had students sort of build on their own with some of Known's tools when I teach the class at MIT again this spring. So I do think, while a lot of what I've described, I do think there's a balance between every, all of us sort of individually figure out how to build this ourselves and how we can build platforms and systems that have these values baked into it, that have the values of giving students control of the means of their production and letting technology connect to these folks. So the last image I'll leave you with is this is a post that popped up in the flow as I was looking at it on June 25th. So this was two weeks ago. So this is one of my students who had a post called the starting again where she found another online learning community that she wanted to participate in and this was the first exercise in that online learning community which it was to make, they called it an unmaking introduction. But the learning experience she had in that course also still was getting sort of fed in to our learning community so we can see her activities persist and move along. And to me that's exactly sort of what I hope can come out of this and I think the kind of contribution to the indie web conversation which is that part of creating the web we want involves helping train a generation of people who use the internet and you use the web to at least have experience with environments that have with environments designed for learning that embody the kind of values that we would like to see in a globally networked world. And so I think education and all of you here who are teachers or are going on to be teachers maybe one way to conclude is I think students learn more from who we are than what we tell them. They learn more from the, they learn at least as much from the environments we create for them to be in as from whatever we tell them to do or whatever we tell them within those environments. So I think who we are and the spaces we create for them are super important. So that's a dump of things for you all to think about and chew on. And we've got 45 minutes if we want to to chat about them. Why don't you all, rather than having people pop up hands at once why doesn't everybody sort of turn to your neighbor and chat for if you're a little group or whatever and chat for a couple of minutes about like one question that you might want to ask or one thing that you thought was ridiculous or one point that you really want to make sure that you take away from this and we'll let people sort of debrief among themselves for a little bit and then we'll come back together. Does that sound good? Ready, go. One of the great things about being a teacher is whenever you get bored you just make everyone stop what they're doing and like come back to you which if you try to do as a student class is not received very well. You can't as a student be like actually this activity isn't interesting why don't we do this other thing I want to do. But as a teacher you can totally do that anytime you want to. And so that's pretty fun. Well I would love to hear some thoughts that folks might, why don't we try to just have a couple of people make some comments and respond to each other's comments and I'll try not to talk for five or six thoughts and then I'll jump in with some summaries and we'll go from there. So some questions that people had things that they thought were problematic or ridiculous things that they were excited about. We can read some of the things off the Twitter feed. But you all were talking very animatedly so there must be good. So I wonder, I don't know if it's important enough for you but I want to come back to something you said at the very beginning and I think I can phrase it verbatim. You said Facebook happened. I don't believe that's really happened. It fulfills the market or vacuums that existed. And if we did not, we certainly couldn't have perceived it but if we created the same level of communication availability in live journal perhaps Facebook wouldn't have happened. And I think when you phrase in things in a way that as you say happened then you take away the stronger ability of changing things. And just like you were talking about the research that everybody went down the wrong lane earlier if we, I think what you're doing is preventing another Facebook happening. So thank you. Great, does somebody want to respond to that or other questions on a different line? I mean, I run a bunch of WordPress installs on the Indeed web fanatic but I'm also really fascinated by things like Snapchat in terms of addressing some of the vulnerability issues or being mobile first. And I know, we were as well as this year went to the Cambridge Housing Authority and they're complaining about how their Windows computer lab was out of date and all the kids there were on their smartphones happily typing away. And I was like, why don't you just give them curriculum on their smartphones? They're like, oh, they can't do that. So where does the web we want fit in a world where it's smart mobile first and where features of something like Snapchat are actually kind of desirable? Like we don't have those features in the web yet and that's why people are migrating as platforms because Facebook's not even feeling that. I can respond, but I'll let us see a couple of other thoughts that people have or questions or area. I know I had some good questions online, what were yours? So I don't have the Indeed web nostalgia at all having lived through it. I found it very exclusive, very male, very discouraging to others and I think it's a little bit of the argument of it was so cool till everybody showed up so. But I have some theories on why the blogging, the great and important work that the open web did failed and the three things I always think of that fall down are on standards. So it was really hard to get interoperability to Paul Freese Point. Two, technical debt, systems like iSites and a lot of these bespoke like Berkman blogs before they went to WordPress. And three, the pain of production level tasks. I worked on an ours digit a community system which was a really early tickle based open source community platform that could have been a Facebook but nobody wanted to build the dam installer. Nobody wanted to make it easier for those that the pain of the production level task. So I feel like there are elements of those communities that didn't deliver, you know, to your point of Facebook just happened. You know, how do you retain the good parts but also deliver the excellence which what likes, you know, so we're not just all swimming in a sea of marketing algorithms. So we're actually able to maintain some of the open stuff. Other responses to that or other questions or thoughts? I mean, some of those three, so the last two comments I think point to this kind of, you know, if the web we lost sort of frames things is like here's the golden age and here's the new thing that came along that's not as good, you know, a more complicated story might be something like, well, both of these things have some virtues and so how can we start sort of combining and putting some of these virtues together? How do we take the values that we care about from the open web and how do we instantiate them, you know, in systems that are easier to use than some of the original versions of the open web were, you know, and actually take advantage of, you know, part of your point of Snapchat too is like, well, here's something that the open web didn't imagine. Here are some places where these walled gardens are super helpful and we could imagine them as super helpful in educational settings and so how do we incorporate that? I mean, that's certainly why I'm super excited by the organizations that are trying to make a go, you know, reclaim hosting as a nonprofit but known as a startup and an incubator and there's lots of things that they're trying to do in that incubator but I think they see education as one kind of key piece to that, you know, and there's a, yeah, there's a whole lot of production level tasks that conceivably they could, you know, both on a system level, the idea, you know, I mean, reclaim hosting has done a great job of that, you know, like push a few buttons and everyone has a domain, you know, it's somewhat more difficult than that but it's much less difficult than saying and here everyone is the three pages on how you make your own domain and if you have problems come see me, you know, and then known as trying to solve a lot of these problems of sort of how do we publish things and I think actually trying to, you know, take advantage of the fact that we can give people a wider range of choices that we can say, you know, you wanna publish something that's only gonna go to this community, you know, to some extent via Snapchat, like great, let's do that if you wanna publish it to multiple communities in different kinds of ways, let's do that but the sort of core values that are animating the architecture are these pieces of student ownership and of student ownership of choice and of the capacity for openness and then I think, you know, I think your comment about Facebook just happening is, you know, I think it's a great corrective to the language that like, you know, the web we lost, I mean the other phrase of it could be like the web we didn't choose, you know, the web we all decided we actually didn't want and you know, I think it's important. Or the web that wasn't for everyone and yeah, and that's sort of a big point that Dave makes in his last Atlantic piece where he uses this metaphor of sort of paradise being paved over but the great thing is that actually like, you know, you can't pave over the whole internet, like if you wanna have your weird open web over here, like that's great, you know, no one is getting rid of it, you know, your links just aren't rising to the top of Google anymore and you're not getting as many hits on your blogs as you used to and so forth. You know, I mean, arguably, you know, any of these kind of conversations that are provoked by systems that require students to, by systems that require students to encounter these questions is a good thing in and of themselves, like regardless of whether or not students, you know, whatever answer students come up with being at, you know, I mean, just like we could have in the physical world said, like, why is this conference room set up around a table? You know, why am I sitting here and why are you all sitting there? Why, you know, how does that shape the experiences we have and so forth? I was like, you know, maybe one other dimension, so one way that we might address some of Perry's concerns of pain of production and those kinds of things is with these sorts of systems, with sort of commercial providers that make this possible. I actually am certainly very concerned for the viability of these commercial providers for this reason. I mean, it sort of comes back to this idea of a curse of familiarity. If you look at the largest education technology startups, one of the characteristics that they almost all have in common is that they digitize some common feature of a typical classroom. So one of the 50 most visited websites in the world is Quizlet. And Quizlet makes online flashcards. It makes it super easy to make online flashcards. It is the most widely visited education-related website in the world by some measures. And part of its success is if you go to that site, you'll be like, oh, these are flashcards. Like, I know what to do with flashcards. Like, you know, flip them over and they'll ask me a question and I'll tell you an answer. There's sort of nothing to figure out there. The challenge, of course, is that if all of us sat around the room and said, like, what are some real problems that we have in the education system? I think very few of us would be like, the deficit of flashcards is something that's like holding back our young people from flowering their full potential. So the things that we already do and the things that we know how to do are relatively easy to scale. If you show up to, you know, if you show up to reclaim hosting and say, like, we're gonna give every kid at a university or website, there'll be plenty of people who'd be like, why? You know, what's the point of that? Or if we said, you know, I've got this publishing platform where like students can own their own material and they can syndicate it to different kinds of places and be like, but there's nothing in my educational experience that looks like that. Why would we need that? And so if you want people to adopt these technologies, if you want people to adopt these pedagogies and the technologies that are sort of integrated with them, you know, then you need evangelists like me who are like going around in rooms of 40 people at a time and being like sort of this is how this looks and here's why you might wanna try it. And, you know, certainly if you're funded by venture capital like, you know, known in some of these other places wanna be, it's way easier to tell venture capitalists the story of this is the thing that people are already doing and we're gonna digitize it and we're gonna get them to do it really quickly and then you'll get your money back versus, you know, here's a set of practices that we're gonna have to, like here's a technology that requires us to retrain people on a whole new set of practices and it's gonna require building this enormous community that'll take 10 years to get any kind of scale or traction at all. Like that's a much less attractive story to the venture community. You know, a website, people saying why? Like I think that maybe that's more possible. I mean, I think it's obviously more possible at a higher education level but then standardization really gets in the way maybe. You get down into the lower because maybe it doesn't make sense for every 12 year old to have a website but it's really, I mean, it seems like it would be really hard to give, you know, in a public school site, oh, here you guys have the choice of having a website because it's either, I mean, it seems right now that it's really all or nothing. So could you talk about how that could be more complicated at the lower level of this venture community? Yeah, you know, I mean, certainly, so anytime we talk in education there's probably like a spectrum of things that we, you know, you brought up the 12 year old and we say like, I bet just about everyone in the room would agree like no 12 year old, no kindergarten needs their own website. Maybe there might be some takers, huh? I already did this too. All right, so maybe they, so maybe we go down to, so they're released, so the distribution will look one way at kindergarten, the distribution will look the other way at high school. We say, man, like when you're getting ready for college, maybe it would do something. You know, I like, we might be able to agree on a principle like by the time someone leaves a system of schooling, it would be awesome if when you Googled their name, if when a student Googles her name, she's super proud of what she sees. Like that might be a principle that a bunch of us would be like, oh, that might be sort of like one thing that we think might be kind of cool. I mean, there's no doubt that in educational systems, you know, like most, there's, you know, doing good work oftentimes requires being subversive, you know, and there's something that's sort of subversive about this, but about lots of other things that people are trying in K-12 education. You know, I mean, I'm pretty optimistic about, about, you know, saying that the best place for students to learn how to participate in all of our different communities, our academic communities, our social communities, our civil communities is when they're in school and when they're with us. And we probably, you know, and so I think school might be a really good time to have students, you know, set up their own website, set up their own domain, you know, like, I mean, if we're, I mean, a lot of what we're doing in computer classes now is teaching them how to use Word. I mean, I would stop teaching PowerPoint to every single child in the nation and replace it with, you know, start your own WordPress blog in a heartbeat. And we have time that's devoted to both of those kinds of things. So yeah, I mean, but, you know, Alison has some, yeah. As I teach web design at the high school level and use WordPress, they learn how to use it. And part, look, one of the first things we do at the beginning of the year is we talk about when you get Google, what comes up first? How do I control that? They all have a page on my WordPress class blog and they're all responsible for what goes on there. So it's like a good portfolio for them and they also learn how to use WordPress. But again, it's the high school level. They are under 18, but it's part of the class that they're on this site and they learn how to do this stuff. So I do think in some situations you can do it if it's part of the class, but plenty of other teachers have class blogs that aren't teaching web design. So I do understand if you're getting down to middle school and younger can be a real challenge, but I think at least at the high school level, you have a little bit more leeway to do that kind of thing. I wonder about, I mean, I would hate to see the kind of stuff I would have made at 12 or 13 still available on the open internet. And in fact, occasionally I find bits of my old live journal and kind of step back and forth. I wonder what the role of things like pseudonyms are like and giving youth an opportunity to control. I mean, I wonder like, is the average 10 year old forward thinking enough to realize how to follow them into the rest of their life? Yeah, definitely not. So, you know, and pseudonymony, I think is a great issue to tackle in, I mean, in my class, you know, I sort of said to students, you're more than welcome to participate with a pseudonym. And I think that's a great choice, but we didn't actually take the time to be like, but as it turns out, pseudonymony is kind of complicated. Like if you actually want to maintain your pseudonymony, you need to make sure that you know, that you like don't have any connections to go back to who you are, or you have to decide sort of what degree you wanna maintain that and so forth. So to some extent, I mean, I basically in giving people the permission to do so, I more or less like gave technically literate people the permission to do so, but less technically literate people didn't actually also have the skill set to be able to do that. I think these questions of forgetting are really good ones. They're, you know, it may be that we do want stuff to disappear over a certain length of time. Now, to some extent, we can say, if you control those things, like that's the best way to make sure that stuff can disappear if like you own the delete button of it, although part of what these websites do is sort of keep a copy of things. You know, like, I mean, I'm pretty happy to delete anything that anybody wants me to delete off of it, but you know, that requires a like, lifelong commitment for me. I mean, maybe the site should have some kind of well-defined, you know, sunset. Maybe we say like, this is all gonna be on for 10 years, or maybe, you know, for students in a professional, you know, maybe if we do these kinds of things with middle school students, we say, you know, things are only, you know, I'm gonna delete every copy as of your middle school graduation, and then you decide what you wanna keep or what you wanna delete or whatever else and so forth, but I think these questions of, you know, what we ought to, I mean, they're real virtues to remembering. They're real virtues to being able to say like, what you create, you know, what you create is not just a paper you're gonna turn in, have me look at, have me scratch a couple of comments on and put a grade on the top and then hand back to you for you to throw away, but in fact, like, this is something that you can put on the web and people in the world can see it, and balancing that with like, dang, we really don't want the world to see this forever, or like, we wanna be able to take it down. I mean, sorry, I think it just goes beyond, like, particularly for like the trans community or women who may be victims of harassment, and I just feel like there has to be a lot more thinking about this question. Yeah. I don't know, like, yeah, anyway. No, I mean, I think those, that some of what I meant by inequitable vulnerabilities that, I mean, certainly one way, it's a tricky balance. If you go, the more you surface circumstances of risk for the most vulnerable people, the more you would say like, man, maybe we're really out of a walled garden. Maybe that's like the safest thing to do is to put sort of everything there. But, and then you're basically saying, okay, people, if you wanna sort of participate openly in discourse, like, figure out how to do it on your own, versus like, you know, and especially with this balance of like, the risks are really easy to articulate, the risks are easier to articulate than the benefits. And so when people are novices in this space, sort of how do you induct them, preparing them for all of these eventualities, you know, and the risks that you raise are sort of totally real and, you know, and could very well be, you know, fatal to the effort, you know, in a very reasonable way. I'm wondering how, in the context of your course, or just your thoughts on it in general, and you worked with, and done some research on MOOCs, and so kind of related to that issue is, how do you balance your commitment to openness, particularly in the context of your course, with students protections under FERPA? Yeah, yeah, so for this particular class, the way we dealt with FERPA was, the class is voluntary, the class is not part of any, it's not required in any way, it meets certain requirements, but you would never have to take the class and sort of like plastered on my syllabus and mentioned in the shopping period and all that kind of stuff is like, a condition of being part of this class is doing work openly, like, you will, and there's other classes you can take if you don't want to do that. And then how these kinds of things operate in circumstances, as things get more required, it's sort of more complicated around that. And of course, FERPA was written in 1976 and is not terribly well-scoped for the world that we live in now, and some of the kinds of questions that we could ask about it like literally haven't been adjudicated, and so we don't know. MOOCs are a little bit easier because they're voluntary and because at least the Harvard and MIT don't treat them this way, but the chief privacy officer of the US DOE this past year said that MOOCs students weren't covered under FERPA because they weren't accessible to Title IV funds or something like that. But yeah, yeah, FERPA is a whole set of legal concerns, which I think we're more or less dealt with responsibly here, although some may disagree, but if you could imagine a high school, regular public high school, which would say, we think it would be an awesome thing for every student to have a digital portfolio, for them to curate that portfolio and to be able to put it online, and what are the consequences of those kinds of activities? Question after the question that was asked before that. So do you think there is a significant value in a kindergartner who a week later realizes that he doesn't really want it there and he only thought that because he was angry at his friend a week later, and that he can carry through the rest of his life of not putting things out there because they might change their mind? So she started her question with saying that she might not want to read what she wrote at 12. So my question is, do you think there is a significant value in the 60-year-old kindergartner post that he's angry with his friend? And a week later, he's not angry and he doesn't want it to be there. Do you think it's a valuable lesson in itself not to post things? Yeah, so one sort of theory would be that in order to learn social norms, we have to make mistakes around social norms and one way we could have students do that is to say, let's take all of the risky social interactions and keep them out of schools so we're not responsible for them and have people figure them out on their own. Another thing is to say, let's bring some of these social interactions intentionally into schools because these are places that we can help people make these decisions better than they would otherwise and handle ramifications and so forth. So people have commitment to each other. So my general leaning is towards those risks, but they also incorporate a whole series of risks. There's a little bit of research on this too. There's a group in the UK called Offstead, which is kind of like an inspector service. And a number of years ago, they did a research study on sort of different approaches to internet filtering. And they found that schools which had the sort of safest and healthiest discourses around the internet were ones which were not totally locked down. But when there was some sort of basic filtering and then guidance for students about how to participate in the web because the students in those spaces had the chance to learn decision-making. But of course, like learning decision-making involves making bad decisions. And how many of those things do we want to be responsible for? I'm just sort of getting back to the kind of web we watched. I sort of couldn't help but thinking in terms of like, the date over the MOOCs we lost. The sort of C MOOC versus X MOOC. Yeah. Debate and, you know, just what we don't do, the sort of connectivist vision is like really cool, but it's also like really hard. It's also like really eccentric. It's entirely clear that that was something we lost versus that was a subculture. And I'm wondering if like a lot of the things that have the overwhelming numbers were pushed from the side, they're just whatever subset that those earlier tools, whether it's earlier blogs and things we're doing actually are being effectively handled by, whether it's Facebook or those are, there's a problem no longer of the means of production. If they have the means of production now, the problem is moving somewhere else. Yeah. Easy. Easy. Becoming a senior, you know, it's like looking around sort of currency of course, so I thought it would be easier to get more stuff on the web and zero when, you know, there's too much stuff left to find anyway. Yeah. So part of John's idea is that the very first courses that were called MOOCs were sort of built in like 2008 and 2009 by Canadian educators and they adhered a lot to these kinds of systems where people created things online and a lot of what the courses did was to connect these things together. And then when, you know, a bunch of folks at Stanford started building these courses, which are kind of video lecture based and had a bunch of multiple choice questions and also called the MOOCs. Of course, you know, the original, to some extent the original people who coined MOOCs were kind of horrified that this thing, which was a series of video lectures was now being used to describe what they really cared about. I mean, you know, so what, I mean, to some extent it's kind of a connoisseur's question, like, you know, the, you know, you could say that these large scale video lecture capture driven MOOCs were better because they're more popular. You know, they were adopted much more widely, people wanted them more and so people are getting what they wanted. You know, you could, I mean, I think the people who are advocates, you know, and it's sort of like the connectivist learning environments are good for the weird subcultures who like those kinds of things. But what most of our education system is like someone to tell us what we should know and to ask us a little questions to see whether or not we know it. You know, and so the response to that is something like, it means, again, this idea of the curse of the familiar. You know, the argument against that is sort of like, you know, we don't have optimized, we have education systems that are optimized for our comfort level and optimized for our familiarity but not optimized for the richest learning experience that we might be able to have within them. And so, and if that's true, then, you know, getting people to do, you know, then we face this challenge of trying to get people to do new kinds of things that both feel awkward, feel anxiety provoking, take more time, conceivably take time away from sort of the core content of the kinds of things that we're trying to learn. But if we can get sort of through all of those things end up paying dividends. Now one sort of bet that a learning institution can make is to say, let's as an institution make a commitment to some of these learning ideas and so we can essentially like amortize the cost of training people how to participate in these systems over a whole bunch of courses and other things. Like that's what the University of Mary Washington is doing and Davidson is doing is basically say, let's build an infrastructure upfront. Let's like put as part of freshman orientation sort of how to participate in these learning environments like we teach you how to do citation like we, you know, remediate your writing if we need to and things like that. And then all of us have this, and then every, you know, teacher going forward can take advantage of this infrastructure that we have without having to feel like like, man, I'd love to teach my statistics class like this but I'm not going to take two weeks out of statistics to help you figure out how to set up your blog and so forth. You know, and I think there are plenty of high schools that are taking similar kinds of approaches of saying, let's teach people how to participate in a network learning environment early on. And then we can all take advantage of having taught people how to do that at the beginning. So I think there are some like, you know, I mean, for anyone who sort of trapped in their own, you know, as an like me, an individual instructor in Harvard Graduate School of Education with like zero leverage over what the school does, then there's sort of a set of issues. You know, when you control a whole, and you know, when you have some power to influence a whole institution, you come up with a whole different set of answers of like, oh, well, let's see if we can sort of get everyone to participate in a different kind of way. You know, obviously, I mean, it's probably clear from my commitments that I think that I don't, that I think we're over committed to things that look familiar to us because we experienced them for so long. And I think there'd be a lot that we could benefit from trying to find ways of challenging educators and students to try new things, including systems that gave students more control over how they, you know, produced what their work. But you don't have to agree. Any other thoughts that folks have? Well, good, well, I'm more than happy to stick around and continue chatting or let other people do so, but I'm very grateful for you for spending part of your lunch and hour with me. Very grateful to Berkman Center for hosting us here. And I hope you all have a wonderful afternoon. Look forward to carrying on the conversation. Thank you.