A Facebook education?

A few days ago, my friend Jill suggested that I come up with a catchy acronym for my new position on MOOCs. She suggested:

@jhrees Superprofs’ Pedagogical Open Online Redistrib of Communication Structures (SPOORCS) Anti SPOORCS: Differentiation matters.

— Jill Anderson (@jillian6475) June 11, 2014

While that’s not bad, the more I thought about it, the more I figured why fall into the same trap that the Antifederalists did? I’d rather be for something than anti- anything moving forward as I think I’d generate much better karma that way. Therefore, from this moment on, my new edtech position (since the problem remains more than MOOCs) is pro- faculty autonomy.

What does that mean? The term I’ve previously used in this respect is “professor-centered,” but somehow being pro-faculty autonomy seems more useful as a jumping off point for the kind of technological decisions that we professors increasingly face with each passing semester.

Suppose, for example, you’re forced to use an LMS because your university mandates it, or because you’re just too busy to design your own customized learning environment. As Groom and Lamb point out in that wonderful article which I cited the other day:

Instead of supporting “learning enhancement environments” on an enterprise level, colleges and universities implement and mandate the use of “learning management systems.” Thus, before we even begin to encounter the software itself, we privilege a mindset that views learning not as a life-affirming adventure but instead as a technological problem, one that requires a “system” to “manage” it. This mindset and its resulting values result in online architectures that prioritize user management, rigidly defined and restricted user roles, automated assessments, and hierarchical, top-down administration. Yes, creative and engaging learning can happen almost anywhere. But environments matter, and disturbingly often these systems promote formulaic and rigid instruction.

Faculty autonomy would at least mean that any system would have to be customizable enough to express a faculty-member’s individual teaching style. That’s good for professors and good for students.

Since building your own teaching domain is a daunting task to many folks, they should at least understand what kinds of systems they should avoid. My good friend and fellow Princeton, New Jersey native Jonathan Poritz from our math department has a name for this: a Facebook education. To describe what he means, Jonathan clued me in to the work of Columbia Law School’s Eben Moglen. Here Moglen is describing the problem with Facebook all the way back in 2010:

Facebook is the web with, ‘I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that.’ It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a Panopticon built out of web parts. And it shouldn’t be allowed. That’s a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at ‘spying all the time’, they are not technically innovative. They depend on an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn’t any other business model for them. This is bad. I’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists we should fix it.”

A Facebook education would be an education that operates under these same principles. Instead of setting up a learning environment that’s primarily directed towards promoting learning, it would set up an environment that promotes the interests of the learning management system providers and the administrators who contract with them. This more than anything else should be most of the incentive you need to learn this stuff and start innovating.

But the wonderful thing about the non-corporate edtech types who I’ve come to admire is that they’re working to create a world in which this process would be rather easy. Not only would faculty have autonomy over their classes, but students could have autonomy over their entire web presence. As Groom and Lamb put it,

The point is not that everything must be open source; rather, it’s that we need coherence, and right now, coherence is too often offered at the price of ownership and control, of working within someone else’s application.

That’s right, I’m pro coherence, and the first step towards coherence is regaining control over the teaching process. I’m also still anti- “the misuse of technology to destroy higher education by usurping faculty prerogatives. But I’m also pro- faculty using technology to TAKE BACK the prerogatives that we’ve already lost. How sweet would that be?

You technologists out there should go fix that for everybody.

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