But meanwhile, Pogue declares it’s time to Put Down the Pitchforks on SOPA:

In other words, the protests were effective. There’s no chance that the bills will become law in their current forms. But it was a sloppy success; the scare language used by some of the Web sites was just as flawed as the Congressional language that they opposed.

He wants the opposing sides of this issue to work together to tweak the language to achieve some of SOPA’s ends against pirating sites while guaranteeing due process to the accused. He also accused SOPA protestors of falling into two groups:

Finally, not enough people have acknowledged that the opposition was arguing two totally different different points — the “you’re going about it the wrong way” group and the “we want our illegal movies!” group.

I don’t think that division quite captures the group of people who, like me, are most concerned with preserving the potential of the open Web as the way culture travels in the 21st Century. But one particular sentence of Pogue’s piece made me think that despite acknowledging a sentence earlier that piracy is often a result of inadequate legal offerings by publishers, he really didn’t capture the key reason I opposed (and presumably many other students of the Web’s great potential) these bills.

It should occur to these movie studios that if you don’t give people a legal way to buy what they want, they’ll find another way to get it.

At the same time, what the piracy sites are doing doesn’t seem quite fair, either. Yes, it’s a quirk of the Internet that you can duplicate something infinitely and distribute it at no cost. But that doesn’t make it O.K. to shoplift, especially when the stolen goods are for sale at a reasonable price from legitimate sources. Yes, even if the company you’re robbing is huge, profitable and led by idiots.

Mr. Pogue, I think that quirk is the whole point of the Internet. That anybody in the world can connect to content at no greater cost than making one copy available. In my thesis, I called these nonrivalrous resources (ch. 2.4). When you transfer one copy to someone, there is now one more in the world for no more cost. This applies to all content on the Web, not just pirated Hollywood movies. Every time someone views a web page or a YouTube video, another copy is made, at very little cost. The Web is at its very core a copy machine. The fact that the Web ends the scarcity of copies of content is its key feature. It’s not the Hollywood movies that matter to me; and as a content producer with a forthcoming book, it’s the ability of any person anywhere to access my content that will be important. As I said Wednesday, “The one thing that we can’t give them is the destruction of the Internet and the end of scarcity of information that it makes possible. That is what we’re fighting to save today.”

The big players of the music and movie industry feel that operating in a world where this is a fact of life is too scary to handle. Their business model is stuck in a world where they can exploit the scarcity of copies of content (books, DVDs, CDs) to maintain a high “value” for those copies. They feel they cannot transition to a Web-friendly business model. In fact, as I mentioned in my SOPA protest day post these industries have a history of resisting new technology not through innovation, but through lawsuits and legislation to lock down on people being able to copy cultural works, even for their own use. Clay Shirky, who also responded to Pogue’s post, spoke for a great TED video (14min) on how these players have been trying to lock down people’s ability to share (and compete with them in producing culture). And on that note, Cory Doctorow’s much-shared presentation at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin about “the coming war on general computation” is a must-watch of a 55min talk along the same lines.

Hollywood and the big record labels have a lot of momentum, and even more resources to throw at fashioning the business of culture.

As YCombinator notes this week with its new call for startups aimed at “killing” Hollywood, disruption is due for this culture industry. If they do not take advantage of the Internet to at least make sure movies don’t get released to Swedish theaters four months after US debuts, Hollywood will be disrupted. Giant stars and Avatar-level intensive CGI nonwitstanding, the ability to tell a story on video is getting drastically cheaper by the year. This potential combined with that for cheap distribution via the Internet, means that Hollywood will have competition soon. David Pogue notes that the movie industry’s response to the Internet age has been “almost slack-jawed idiocy.” Laws like SOPA and treaties like the still-progressing ACTA are the industry’s only chance to lock in the success of that idiocy against the huge potential for competition. If they shut down “our” ability to spread culture the Internet-enabled scarcity-averse way, they can keep us on the couch and paying them instead of awake and participating in culture ourselves.

We have the tools to create a culture that is open and accessible to all. Some people use these tools to “pirate” the cultural works of Hollywood, but when other filmmakers outside the walls of the “industry” embrace Web-friendly business models, these tools will be how we share new culture. Besides worrying about not being able to compete without scarcity as a lever, I think Hollywood is also afraid that we will not need them anymore without it. But I think there are many opportunities to make money and spread culture to many more people that Hollywood can take advantage of.

A copyright is literally a monopoly, and the MPAA is led by super-advisor Chris Dodd in trying to use Congress to preserve their monopoly on making culture. We need a better market for culture, for the good of our freedom to participate in culture and that of future generations. I think the key to ensuring the development of a more just and accessible market is the weird quirk of the Internet that has ended the scarcity of content. Like every technological change that the culture industries opposed, from the player piano to Tivo, that have eventually helped them make more money, the Internet will open many new opportunities for cultural commerce. The question is whether Hollywood will wake up to the new opportunities quickly, or only after another dozen SOPA-like confrontations.

Today, many important websites are “going dark” to protest the anti-piracy bills working their way through the US Congress. I’m joining in this protest, because I think the bills would “break” the Internet as we know it, as the only medium known to humanity that could enable virtually anyone to access speech published by virtually anyone else without barrier of cost or scarcity. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) [1] and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) aim to curtail online piracy of intellectual property, seen by the big content industry players in Hollywood and the music industry as a serious risk to their stability and livelihood. As noble as an attempt to prevent freeloaders from profiting by the work of others may be, the bills have been likened to using a bunker busting nuclear bomb when the tool needed is a scalpel.

SOPA and PIPA are particularly targeted at foreign “rogue websites” not directly covered by US copyright law. However, because the operators of foreign sites are not covered by US law, the remedies provided for in the bills apply to US Internet companies, like ISPs and search engines, who would be tasked with modifying their services to expeditiously “prevent access by its subscribers…to the foreign infringing site that is subject to [non-adversarial court orders].” Particularly, many have noted that the methods available to ISPs to block websites pretty much entail DNS blocking, which is one of the toolss used by China to run the “Great Firewall of China”, and index censorship demanded by the Chinese government for search engines to operate in the country.

On Saturday, the White House issued a statement in response to petitions to veto the bills if they arrived on the president’s desk. The Administration rejected certain provisions of the legislation, including the blocking of sites at the DNS level. The White House affirmed its support, however, for the aim of the law and for creating new legal tools to combat piracy of US intellectual property. One of the most substantial parts of the memo, I think, was a call to action for the public and particularly those who oppose SOPA and PIPA.

The President’s Challenge:

So, rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what’s right… Washington needs to hear your best ideas about how to clamp down on rogue websites and other criminals who make money off the creative efforts of American artists and rights holders. We should all be committed to working with all interested constituencies to develop new legal tools to protect global intellectual property rights without jeopardizing the openness of the Internet. Our hope is that you will bring enthusiasm and know-how to this important challenge.

I think that fundamentally government-ordered censorship jeopardizes the openness of the internet and that there is no way around that fact. But I want to take the Administration’s challenge seriously. As I wondered what the tech community can do to help SOPA’s supporters stop suffering from piracy, I came across a little parable asking this question on one of the blogs of the OReilly publishing company, one of the publishing companies that “gets” the Internet and how to make money with post-scarcity models. “What more does government want–or deserve–from the tech world?” Nat Torkington [2]:

All I can think is: we gave you the Internet. We gave you the Web. We gave you MP3 and MP4. We gave you e-commerce, micropayments, PayPal, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, the iPad, the iPhone, the laptop, 3G, wifi–hell, you can even get online while you’re on an AIRPLANE. What the hell more do you want from us?

The best thing we could give to the content industry would be a business model that would allow them to flourish and exploit the opportunities of the Internet. That and the technology needed to fulfill the promise of that model. Except, I look all around my Internet and see people using, and talking about, these business models. And they’re practically giving away the technology that make them possible. I configure free WordPress sites for companies and individuals, and I’ve dabbled in open source shopping cart software. These are the tools you can use to sell content to people, you just have to find them where they are, set the price, and give them a “reason to buy.”

The new models for looking at content that I explored in my thesis (ch.4) are probably far too radical for industry insiders to start with, because I advocate giving up a lot more control than the minimum amount needed to participate in post-scarcity culture. In general, Internet people are just giving business models away, but the content industry is slow to pick them up.  They are slow to pick up practices that would let them exploit the open Internet, because these models represent losing some control over the distribution that they traditionally have enjoyed. (And it’s old news that this industry is slow to accept new technology and quick to sue about it.) But their control is based in scarcity, and how hard and expensive it is to distribute content. It is no longer hard nor expensive. What is hard now is finding the right content to spend your limited money and time on. The real value the content industry can provide now is a matter of curation of the right content to the right fans. And I think there is still a lot of money to be made there.

These are the tools and the technologies to reduce piracy and make it irrelevant. Not new legal tools to wipe websites out of the view of US media consumers.

One of the saddest things I heard in yesterday’s “#SaveTheInternet” briefing put on by the PCCC was from Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures talking about the reluctance of investors to risk their money on businesses exploring new models of music delivery because of the risk that these businesses would get sued by the big content players they would be dependent on for content deals. Instead of realizing the potential of the Internet to get their product into the hands of fans, they shoot themselves in the foot trying to preserve their scarcity-based business models. The movie studios fight Netflix at every turn to wring more money out of contracts for less content instead of offering up their whole collections to every Netflix-like customer at a reasonable price. Netflix grew up on the first sale doctrine for physical media but is trying to put out a hand and lead Hollywood into a world where people pay for movies instead of thinking about pirating them. Spotify is closer to the answer to music piracy than SOPA, but it took years for the record labels to allow it into the US. And it’s instructive to remember how UMG killed perfectly legal video service Veoh with litigation. Any Internet startup that is based on user generated content is subject to that risk.

We who protest SOPA and PIPA want to help content find its way to happily paying fans. The one thing that we can’t give them is the destruction of the Internet and the end of scarcity of information that it makes possible. That is what we’re fighting to save today.

I am writing a novel myself, but I know I will not need SOPA and PIPA to defend my ability to sell it, because I will sell it eyes-wide-open in a world where scarcity of content does not have to exist. I will try to connect with fans by selling my work in formats amenable to their needs for a reasonable price. I will publish it under models that let purchasers know that their money directly supports the creation of my books. Fans feel good when they help the artists they love. They want to do it right. Every content creator and publisher can help them do the right thing. I think my part in taking up this challenge is to show how my business model can be successful, to bravely publish under a model that embraces the open Internet, and to see where it takes us.

If you have any questions, SOPA supporters, contact me, and we’ll try to figure them out.

1. For the “current” version of the bill text, see this Techdirt story from December 12: Lamar Smith Proposes New Version of SOPA with just a few changes (a ‘Manager’s Amendment’). And it seems we are promised a new manager’s amendment that has yet to be seen that will remove DNS blocking provisions (though it also remains to be seen what Rep. Lamar Smith means by removing them, since his first manager’s amendment had a clause right at the top indicating that the law shall not be construed to make DNS blocking mandatory.. but there really aren’t many other ways the laws remedies could be accomplished by the ISPs responsible for implementing it.
2. I thought Nat Torkington was familiar. I particularly liked a post of his from late last year on libraries.

Read more, and contact your Congresspeople.

It’s short. Go ahead and read it. You can come back here in five minutes. Don’t be surprised if you have to look up a few annoying words, but once you get past that, it’s really simple to understand the puzzle he lays out.

Stockton’s semi-barbaric king uses a court of justice where a 50/50 chance decides the guilt of the accused. The criminal has a choice between two doors, one containing a tiger who will kill him (thus, guilty) and one containing a lady who will marry him (innocent).

Stockton says the semi-barbaric king thinks this game is a model of true justice. He says, “Its perfect fairness is obvious.”

As the story goes, the king’s beloved daughter takes a lover far below her station. He is discovered and sent to await the king’s justice. The princess finds out which fate lies behind each door and has a chance to send her lover a signal. She tells him to choose the door on the right, which he does. Stockton then asks the reader which fate she sent him to.

What does a game theory description of this puzzle tell us?

The commoner lover chooses from one door or the other:

At first, you would probably be tempted to describe it like this:

You might think this especially if you’ve taken seriously the notice that the princess suspects her lover of flirting with this particular beautiful lady behind one of the doors.

Stockton asks which fate the princess chose for her lover, when either choice represents a loss for herself. With her suspicions about the lady’s flirting, she would view the outcomes like this:

In the case that he likes the other lady, there is some positive utility in his ending up with her, assuming that the two princess’s outcomes are equally undesirable to her. Is it a question of her nature, then? Is she an altruist (or utilitarian), wishing a positive future on her lover while she stews in jealousy? Or a murderer, sending him to his death to prevent him from loving another, and as Stockton offers, “Would it not be better for him to die at once, and go to wait for her in the blessed regions of semi-barbaric futurity?” (a case that imagines a negative utility of his leading a long life with the other lady.

I’d like to jump in at this point to say that my little sister’s assignment here was to write a sequel to the story. It seemed that most people in her class would try to “beat” the game, maybe to figure out some kind of solution to the puzzle that would bring about a happy ending.

I don’t think such a sequel would match the original, though. The story presents a conundrum, a game under rules that make it perfectly unwinnable. Wouldn’t a true follow-up present a similar puzzle to the reader rather than breaking the king’s rules. After all, Stockton says of the king, “He was a man of exuberant fancy, and, withal, of an authority so irresistible that, at his will, he turned his varied fancies into facts.” He fancied there being no way to defeat his perfect justice, and so I think you have to assume he gets his way here.

But in all this, does Stockton give no credit to the common lover, who has had just as long to think about the princess’s decision as she has? Does he not consider her options? What does he suspect she signaled?

But then, consider, would he think abandoning his (semi-barbaric) princess lover and marrying this other beautiful lady would be preferable to death?

Now, that question is what I think a sequel should be about. But there are even other factors. Since the princess’s signal and the lover’s decision to open one door or the other armed with the information, what message would he be sending with each choice? (And how would his choice signal his interpretation of her motive?) Stockton says he moves without hesitation to the door she signals, so we can assume he decided in advance to follow her advice.

This cuts down the probabilities in the large table to two. Either he would be happy with the other lady and also thinks the princess would want him to be with her, or he wouldn’t want to live without the princess yet also suspects she would send him to his death. He entrusts his lover to choose the right door for him in either case. Just as her decision makes her a murderer or perhaps some kind of altruist, because she loses in every possibility, we can imagine trying to choose the tiger (suspecting it is in the door opposite her signal) to be an example of “true love” yet risks being wrong about her signal and them both looking like asses, as he ends up with the other woman while she had sent him to die.

And really, if you go back and think about how she might also attempt to second-guess his interpretation of her signal, does it even still matter what she signals or what door he chooses? The king’s game seems more like his ideal perfect random justice after all.

…

What is truly annoying to me though is that half of the Google hits for “the lady or the tiger game theory” end up being a stupid Monty Hall math question, adding a third door like in the game show Let’s Make a Deal. That is completely unrelated and invalidates the entire conundrum in the story.

This all said, Stockton did write a follow-up: Discourager of Hesitancy. I haven’t read that yet. We’ll see if he continues as I think would be more fitting than ye olde happy ending of yore.

P.S. Hooray for public domain content.

• McAuley, A. and Walton, F. (2011). Decolonizing cyberspace: Online support for the Nunavut MEd. IRRODL, 12, 4.
• Sandy McAuley’s special presentation summarizing the paper above.
• We will talk about this case with McAuley in about half an hour apparently here: http://piratepad.net/cscl7

Some thoughts:

I wonder about the different effects of using knowledge building (and Knowledge Forum) with graduate students as opposed to k-12 (with whom McAuley did his initial knowledge building research?)

Were the scaffolds useful in framing arguments, theories and evidence? Or did students use the tool in a more freeform manner?
(We spent a little time in this class thinking about how we could extend Knowledge-building prinicples to online tools outside of the Knowledge Forum software, which we don’t have access to. I was wondering if the scaffolds are an essential part of the functionality with this level of student)

The Nunavut MEd program chose to use one Knowledge Forum database for the entire 3-year cycle of the cohort. This allows for bringing information together more readily between classes, synthesizing a portfolio right in the “views” of the system, and potentially building a more coherent body of knowledge, as well as effects on community- and relationship-building. When I was in school, the online components of classes were mostly mediated by Blackboard; this system created strong divides between different classes and did not provide for continuity. Specifically, at some point after a class ended, the associated Blackboard forum would be deleted. Building content into one system across years of learning and many subjects seems attractive to me.

The fact that the cohort size was so small may have made it easier for the Nunavut MEd program to create a seamless online space. Could such a model work with a (much) larger number of students who don’t necessarily take all the same classes together? Where is the breaking point? This model seems to have some distinct advantages over large-and-compartmentalized online participation. Should other programs consider changing their enorllment structure to take advantage of the affordances of Knowledge Forum-like persistent environments?

Another comment on the inaccessibility of Knowledge forum. The paper’s last paragraph:

A final challenge remains for the longer term. Although the Nunavut MEd Knowledge Forum environment has remained open at  the  request  of students  since the program ended, no participation has taken place since shortly after the graduation ceremony in July 2009. Apparently having done its job, it has fallen silent and the knowledge created by program candidates remains inaccessible. Given the groundbreaking work completed by several candidates in their efforts to understand the colonial forces that have shaped education in Nunavut and  to  contribute to its decolonization, this is a major loss. To avoid similar losses in the future, an easy-to-use bridge
between the walled garden of Knowledge Forum and more open and accessible web-based media must be developed.

I haven’t used collaborative representational environments outside of text. I’ve made mindmaps on my own in Freemind and a few other graphical layouts of notes for my classes, but when I collaborated with other people, it was typically through a text-only Google Doc., frequently based on the questions of a study guide or other professor-based guided structure, even when we were not collaborating with the explicit permission of that professor. So, I’ll try to offer some thoughts on how different representations of knowledge or information could affect collaboration on different types of projects.

On my own time, as I’m writing my novel, I’m using a piece of software called Storybook, that offers an organizational approach to writing a novel. The interface is matrix-like, but clearly doesn’t ask for all fields to be filled, as in the example Suthers provides. You can follow the storyline chronologically across different “strands” and see where characters and locations work their way into the story.

See a screenshot.

It would be interesting to submit the story document to editing by a collaborator in this software’s format, before exporting it to a linear text file, though such an experiment would be purely ethnographic: I won’t be able to have a “control” story that I edit a different way to compare the results. I think a collaborator would have a different outlook on the story when viewing it in this format: I certainly approach writing differently than when I was just working with text. It’s easier to jump around to different scenes and approach the story as a big-picture view this way. When I was writing in a word processor, processing words, I kept worrying that the decisions I would make would need to be changed later and it would take me too long to find all the repercussions of the changes I had made across a giant text document. I wanted to plan out the story better and write down my thoughts into a chapter/scene structure, but I was having trouble making that structure real just in my head or in different files for different chapters on my computer and in the cloud.

The Storybook approach lets me jump in and out of the scene view to take notes on the big picture, organize structure, and then jump back in to write while considering the broader changes I had made.

Another example of collaboration using visual representations:

My fiance is in librarian school and has been collaborating in small groups to prepare presentations using a combination of Skype group chat and Prezi digital workspace. This seemed to work pretty well for them earlier this week when they assembled a presentation in about two hours of chat and work. Prezi provides a distinctly graphical-organizational approach to a slideshow. Directing the “camera” through the workspace of a presentation invites graphical organization of concepts, because you don’t want the camera to pass through unrelated slides on its linear journey through the information. Presenters can play with relative size of elements to indicate importance, shapes to link things together. It’s somewhat more free than the knowledge-based tools like Knowledge Forum and Belvedere (that Suthers used).

Here’s a presentation Meggie and her partners worked up in an hour and a half summarizing a particular chapter of reading on Internet protocols’ relation to library science:

And here’s the graphical element of a longer-form presentation on the Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH).

I think the data structures they ended up with, which grouped like information in specific graphical areas, for which each group member took responsibility in the presentation, is an outgrowth of the tool structure. However, because the “camera” moves through the information in a linear manner, it may be less likely to foster a high level of connection between different topics. I think presenters are less likely to move back to previously presented information to explore new connections because the linear “flow” of the presentation is an ingrained part of the tool.

You can see an exception to this pattern as Meggie described the structure of Library of Congress subject headings. Scroll through the second presentation to the “conceptual analysis” section and see how Meggie moves back and forth between the same slides as she explained the relations between subject headings. UF (used for) for equivalence (Livestock UF Farm animals), hierarchical relations like BT (broader term — Livestock BT Agriculture), NT (narrower term — Livestock NT Sheep), and Associative relationships like RT (related term – Livestock RT Food Animals) and SA (see also).

Anyway, our class meeting is coming up in an hour, so if you are going to have any time to look at this, I’d better post it now.

Some prompts/questions for Wk 1. Feel free to respond to these, or, better yet, post your own! To tie this into the assessment framework, we could create another “Questioner” Badge, for those who would like to pose general quesitons to the community…

The questions below are posed with specific relation to our own course:

#1. Wenger writes that “participation ‘refers not just to local events of engagement in certain activities with certain people, but to a more encompassing process of being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities’” (1998: 4).
- What types of established practices are we either explicitly or implicitly relying upon in order to create an #introcscl learning community? How do we begin to talk about identity in the context of an 8 week, online course?

• The community that has congregated around p2pu and online open education has developed a set of tools and methods to execute collaborative learning that are distinct from the tools of the university. These include the notion that you turn in an “open” assignment by posting it on a blog, tweeting it with #csclintro, and aggregating it into the class’s view at the central class portal. This CoP will be the only one that does it with precisely this hashtag, though the technique is shared among a broader community of open learners. In this course, we’re developing knowledge of a specific vocabulary and concept set together. It will be specialized,

#2 . Can we consider ourselves (the #introcscl core group + followers) a community of practice?

• I think so: CoPs can be more or less formal, have varying degrees of longevity, and include different amounts of individual dedication. Lave and Wenger said, “Learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners” as part of an attempt to say that “mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the socio-cultural practices of a community”, but I think the first half can be separated. If we are learning, we are participating in a CoP. According to the theory, if we are to learn well, we must make it a good one and fully integrate ourselves into the subject area and discussion.

#3. In his book, Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age, Bereiter argues that “situated cognition theory falls short when it comes to handling the status of knowledge once it is pried loose from practice” (57). In other words, the ideas of ‘situated cognition’ and ‘communities of practice’ have helped to conceptualize and articulate how knowledge is constituted in social relations and cultural tools (particularly with respect to slowly evolving and traditional communities or groups); however, they do not deal adequately with the abstract knowledge – the “less situated” type (as Bereiter describes, “knowledge there for the taking, by anyone who has access to it and who can make something of it“)  (55). These ideas are also cannot be applied adequately to contemporary contexts that are characterized by rapid change and fluctuation.
- Is the model of a ‘community of practice’ relevant or useful when describing or defining a P2P “study group” like this one? What components can be useful to draw from when considering course design or assessment strategies? What concepts might we need to build or even abandon?

• First of all, to claim that knowledge is ever “there for the taking” requires a theory of how one acquires knowledge. And “making something of it” implies contextualization. Bereiter may be right that theories of situated cognition don’t explain well how knowledge is transferred from the context of one CoP to another, though you could come up with examples of when it happens. In fact, I believe transferring knowledge from one context to another is an important human skill (and one our models of learning must take into account.)
• To that end, I combine Connectivist theory from Downes and Siemens with Cognitive Metaphor Theory from Lakoff and Johnson. From Connectivism, we understand society is composed of webs of overlapping communities each connected to different but overlapping knowledge sets. For example, English speakers are a connectivist web. From Conceptual Metaphors, we have tools to describe how knowledge is transferred between domains. (For example LOVE IS A JOURNEY, one of Lakoff and Johnson’s core metaphor examples, allows us to reason about a complex topic, love, using the familiar players and logic inherent to a different context, journeys.) My favorite thing about these two theories is how they can be applied to communities and domains of many different sizes, shape, and formality. Whereas it may be hard to describe the relationships bonding all Americans, for instance, into one community of practice (which is more of a container metaphor, where one is IN or OUT), it’s not hard to imagine them as a network, where nodes are not all necessarily connected to one another and bonds may be strong or weak between any of them. Connectivist theory is looser than communities of practice and begins to make up for the holes between contexts that Bereiter feels some knowledge can fall. Cognitive metaphors allow people to transfer knowledge they built up within one CoP in a certain vocabulary into another context. Metaphor is the tool of abstraction Bereiter is looking for, I think. Within a metaphor, knowledge is not absolutely abstract. It is situated in a domain, yet it is portable.
• I think that cognitive metaphors may allow us to be a little looser with the concept of communities of practice, enough that where a context appears to take the form of a CoP, we can apply the reasoning familiar to that theory as if it were a metaphor. “Intro to CSCL is a Community of Practice” – Then, we can transfer our knowledge of working with communities of practice to how we deal with the class. This allows us to analyze how well the CoP concept fits in the CSCL-Intro context. I think, pretty well. We are developing a shared vocabulary and set of tools, between the p2pu forum, #csclintro tag on Twitter, and user blogs, etc. The familiar elements are there: people, concepts, tools, a purpose. There may be a couple elements familiar to the CoPs people have occupied before, like a hierarchy with a boss or instructor, but I think enough of the metaphor maps successfully to be able to reason based on the logic of CoPs.
• To be a successful community of practice, we can draw on Wenger and Lave: “the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the socio-cultural practices of a community” – If we are to learn about CSCL, we must become familiar with the important perspectives in the field through our readings and discussion. As an example of CSCL in practice, this p2pu course can actually advance the field by testing certain variables in course design and assessment. For example, we are testing a badges system of peer assessment. This is a new technique in learning, and we will make our contribution to the field by seeing how it works.

P.S. I don’t think we should offer a “questioner” badge. Questioning is something everybody should feel like they should/could be doing during a course without making it out to be a special achievement. I think offering a questioner badge may pose a psychological barrier to asking questions. After all, we can throw out those questions on #csclintro and they’ll be imported into the class. It’s just natural.

'Working on Computers' (CC-BY-NC-SA by Kathy Cassidy on Flickr)

This spring, I’m participating in a free course at P2PU that focuses on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. I don’t study education formally in an institutionalized program, but I am really passionate about opening learning to people like myself outside the university context as part of my free culture advocacy. In the case of CSCL, the field is new enough that not all education programs have courses specifically focused on it and haven’t entirely adapted current curriculum to account for it.

As I noted in my notes from reading DIYU by Anya Kamenetz, I was often (though not always) disappointed in my university undergrad study by the inefficiency of class proceedings, by how little exploration of the subjects took place compared to what I felt was possible. Then, after completing my degree, I took an open online course about open education and found an approach that used time efficiently, offered an incredible amount of personalization and engagement because students’ work was by and large open to one another. Instead of dozens of people writing papers at the end of the term that only one professor would ever read, blog posts spread around as discussion progressed, informing further discussion. The online meeting sessions, though quite early in the morning in my time zone, were unusually productive compared to many lectures. The advantages I noticed in my experimentation with CSCL were not exclusive to “open” education outside of the university context, but convinced me that discussions of how open techniques can inform education must include this evidence of how much better CSCL can be than learning without collaboration (and without peer connections) instead of focusing simply on possible cost savings.

I hope to explore and understand how collaboration can create better education this term. I’m excited to get started, even though adding another thing on top of my existing writing projects and wedding planning and full time work is going to make things quite busy.

Goals for the course:

• To learn about CSCL
• As Stian said in his intro video, to bring fields of open education and CSCL together and increase conversations between people focused on each.
• To try out CSCL; The course itself is an experiment in open education and computer supported collaborative learning.
  Example: We’re testing a badge method of peer assessment to gauge completion. We’ll get a diploma signed by everybody who completes the course.
  It’s non-hierarchical; it’s not based on a expert broadcasting his or her knowledge model, but on collaborative learning among peers.

About the course mechanics, for anybody else reading this who is interested:

• It will run for 8 weeks on new.p2pu.org. Schedule posted on the site (developing in 2-wk chunks)
• There are two levels of engagement: Participants and “Followers” – Course work is done in the open; people can see what is going on and participate from the outside, for example, by posting tweets using the course hashtag #csclintro

Course Materials for Week 1: (and a couple notes on each). This week’s readings provide broad-based background on some educational theory the course will rely upon to develop the concept of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning.

• Intro video by Stian
  • The goals he mentions in the video roughly inspired my own above.

• Communities of Practice on infed – the encyclopedia of informal learning
  • I was interested in the consequences understanding communities of practice has on how individuals are assessed.
  • The summary of communities of practice mentions a critique of “systems oriented to individual accreditation”. Focusing on individual learning to the exclusion of analyzing how learning takes place throughout the group will inevitably miss some.
  • As fellow course participant Martin says in his first #csclintro blog entry, Individual accreditation is necessary. I think this is true partly because people will move between different CoPs throughout their lives. Businesses hire people based on their skills (as understood within their profession) and also their potential to join an existing institutional community of practice. Martin points out that in the case of doctors, assessment should describe their ability to perform tasks expected of them within their CoP. I think that a CoP-literate understanding of how doctors are assessed should recognize how well a doctor is integrated into the network-based knowledge determined essential by the hospital’s CoP. To do “an arterial blood gas and interpret it” requires integration with the appropriate tools, language/concepts, and range of possibilities developed by medical research. I think the key in this case would be to understand that medical knowledge exists within a broad community of practice that spans the entire medical profession and specific knowledge exists in localized CoPs, such as within one hospital. I agree with Martin that individual assessment should not be abandoned, because doctors need to know their stuff, and those who employ them need to have confidence in that knowledge.
  • Individual accreditation should not be abandoned by those who begin to understand CoPs but should be adapted instead to take group learning into account. Individual assessment can’t be dropped, because it’s necessary in order for individuals to move and advance within their professions, but part of the assessment should include an account of their role in CoP learning. It should recognize that learning that developed withing one community can be spread into new CoPs through individuals’ connections.
    • When McDermott (1999) says, “Learning traditionally gets measured as on the assumption that it is a possession of individuals that can be found inside their heads… [Here] learning is in the relationships between people”, besides prefiguring Connectivist Theory (See Downes and Siemens)
    • People build up their own Personal Learning Networks, through which knowledge is developed, and they can provide access to this network knowledge to those whom they become connected. If they are to be assessed on their knowledge, an assessment that incorporates understanding of how an individual’s knowledge is spread throughout a network would describe what they could bring to a new CoP via their previous connections.

• Constructivism on EduTechWiki
  • I feel I have a basic understanding of Constructivist thought, though I am more partial to Connectivism because I think learning is clearly a network phenomenon and Connectivism’s insistence on that as a foundational principle rings true to me. Nevertheless, I read the Constructivism article so that I’ll hopefully get any references to it within later course discussions.
  • Importantly (I think), constructivism implies that as a theory of learning, it is how learning will occur, no matter whether or not a learning experience is designed from the constructivist point of view.
  • If you are trying to teach with an understanding of constructivism, letting learners develop their understanding through interaction with the topic, perhaps “hands-on”, is the way to go.
    • You don’t use textbooks and lecture as much.
    • This goes along with my belief that a “textbook” is a more natural outgrowth of the development of learning through a course rather than something that you start with. This is a notion I developed after I finished my undergrad and took my first open online course, though even in school, I had started to try to use Google Docs to create collaborative study guides with classmates in advance of tests. Professors noted this with tacit acceptance, but didn’t try to help directly. Now, in my roles as participant or coordinator of open online courses, I try to create collaborative “textbooks” by the end of courses to distill the learning that occurs into an artifact that is available as a reference later on. It’s much easier to create this kind of resource as you go instead of going back later to try to create a summary of the knowledge you developed in a subject. (I have learned this whenever I dig into my boxes of old school notes and become dismayed at the disorganization and decontextualization of the notes.). Building a “textbook” through participation in a course fits with Constructivism, and particularly Constructionism, which “asserts that constructivism occurs especially well when the learner is engaged in constructing something for others to see.”
  • “Trivial Constructivism (basic point): “ Knowledge is actively constructed by the learner, not passively received from the environment.“ 
  • Socio-constructivism: Perhaps the most relevant section of the Constructivism Wiki page to this class, this face of constructivism addresses how the theory responds to recognition that learning is a social process
  • Constructivist teaching tries to cut down on the separation between the learning (school) context and the context in which knowledge will be used (“real world”)
  • Knowledge is cumulative – it is built on knowledge already developed and the processing of previous experience.

But I don’t think that publishers, authors, musicians or other content industry players treat this event as a release; as intellectual property owners or licensees, it’s more like an exercise of control. Within their assumptions of intellectual property and their licenses, they treat publishing as an act of ownership, rather than an act of relinquishment of ownership.

Why isn’t a record release or a book release the moment when it is turned loose to the public, to spread, to absorb, to percolate, and to foster expression in response?

What changes when a piece is released?

Before –> after:

• unavailable to the public –> available to buy
• unknown –> known and talked about

What do we know about releasing other things besides published content?

• Release involves a relinquishment of control.
• A synonym is “liberation,” which involves releasing one to oneself, out of captivity. When an author releases a book, he could think of it as releasing the book to itself, not to himself or to readers.

Here’s one account of the change that occurs on release day: “Before publication day, every new book – novel, biography, poems, history – was invisible. After the magic moment of its release into the world it could be praised or damned at will.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/27/writers-publishing-exploit-social-media

Here, the work is relased to a “marketplace of ideas” sort of space where critical activity may take place. The response generated is academic rather than artistic. This is considered just use. One of the main questions in the conversation about a work is “is it good?” This space tacitly takes the “liberation” sense of release for granted. It is assumed that a book is judged on its own merits and succeeds or fails independently of its creator.

Why is the critical realm a special case of creative response to a release? What makes us treat artistic responses differently? This assumption about the difference in where “release” is taken seriously would lead a piece’s derivative work in the same genre be considered a ripoff. A book’s author does not traditionally “release” the book into a space where artistic followup reactions are permitted. Yet we know it is a fact of human nature that art provokes response, critical and artistic. But artistic utilization of work to create a new one is a ripoff of another’s intellectual property that has been relinquished. Authors don’t release books for that. Their lawyers attack those who don’t respect the copyright.

I think that’s a result of how the author thinks about the piece. As I go try to write a novel I am also trying to decide how to conceive of how it will be released. To whom am I releasing? As the story comes to me, I feel like I will eventually be releasing it into itself, performing an act which some people may choose to pay me for.

At the end of the article, the NYT reveals its authors’ affiliations: “Scott Turow, a novelist, is the president of the Authors Guild. Paul Aiken is its executive director. James Shapiro, a member of the guild’s board, teaches Shakespeare at Columbia.” It is not surprising that the article is merely a boring rehash of a nearly empty assertion that “innovative” content creation depends on the ability to lock people out from experiencing it: “Those who paid could enter and see the play; those who didn’t, couldn’t.” They specifically dodge the wording “those who couldn’t pay, couldn’t,” but just because the Authors Guild doesn’t want to address the issue of inequality in the ability to pay for art doesn’t mean that it’s not relevant to the question of how laws should govern cultural distribution. As far as this piece is concerned, authors and paying customers are the only valid participants in culture.

The only treatment of any possible counterargument about copyright’s effectiveness as a public policy encouraging innovation dismisses all criticism as either “counterintuitive”:  “Traffickers in stolen music movies and, increasingly, books… are abetted by a handful of law professors and other experts who have made careers of fashioning counterintuitive arguments holding that copyright impedes creativity and progress. Their theory is that if we severely weaken copyright protections, innovation will truly flourish. It’s a seductive thought, but it ignores centuries of scientific and technological progress based on the principle that a creative person should have some assurance of being rewarded for his innovative work.” Besides noting that The Authors Guild misses the point of those arguing that copyright has grown overpowered and overlooks every example cited in those arguments, I must make the point that copyright makes no such assurance. Plenty of authors, musicians, and playwrights who have been granted copyrights for their creations have not made money on it. Copyright only protects them against other people making money off the creation in some ways without their permission. It does not automatically create a public willing to pay for it.

If you have ever read one of these “law professors’” arguments, you can see that this piece absolutely mischaracterizes them and that centuries of progress are absolutely the core of the argument itself. Lawrence Lessig is probably the best known of the “law professors,” and his suggestions often hinge on using copyright to ensure both fair treatment of creators and reasonable access to work. It seems that the Authors Guild is probably not going to ever truly respond to a copyright-critical argument and never reference the arguments directly as long as it exists. They rely on generalization to the point of exclusion of important details. As you can see:

“Since the Enlightenment, Western societies have been lulled into a belief that progress is inevitable. It never has been. It’s the result of abiding by rules that were carefully constructed and practices that were begun by people living in the long shadow of the Dark Ages. We tamper with those rules at our peril.” Not surprisingly, the members of the Authors Guild make absolutely no mention of the tinkering the US government has done to copyright law, notably the extension of its term from 28 years (including voluntary extension) to 70 years past the death of the author. Not to mention that the whole point of this article seems to be the promotion of a law-tampering remedy: “the White House has pledged to propose a new law to address rampant piracy within the year.”

The ability of content creators to tap into existing work is not given any service. The example of Shakespeare is particularly a poor choice, because above almost every other playwright in English-speaking history, Shakespeare is known for adapting existing stories, characters, and other material for his own. (There are extended discussions about how authors borrow, “plagiarize,” and adapt existing content.. maybe see this.) Our definitions of plagiarism or “ripping off” often are carefully constructed to avoid castigating the sort of borrowing Shakespeare (and Disney) are associated with. Never mind the fact that it is precisely because Shakespeare’s plays are long out of copyright, so many theaters (including tight-budgeted high schools) can afford to put them on and so many publishing houses have made money selling print editions.

For more on the poor choice of Shakespeare as the touchstone of this argument, see Jason Linkins’ response at the Huffington Post.

As always, in response to copyright maximalists determining that culture would be a wasteland without strong intellectual property protection, I point to the world of fashion. Garments are not copyrighted, but could you complain you don’t see innovation? Lady Gaga certainly finds some innovative minds making a living in the field.

…posting, at risk of this blog becoming solely a kneejerk reaction to over-generalized copyright maximalism…

The FCC voted in new “Net Neutrality” rules on Tuesday, that have been criticized from many angles: Why everyone hates new net neutrality rules—even NN supporters.

Regulation should serve to create the sort of marketplace that incentivizes innovation and the improvement of services for the public. Neutrality rules that allow paid prioritization are very helpful for ISPs trying to deal with oh-so-much-Netflix-traffic, but they’re a crutch to lean on instead of expanding the amount of bandwidth available. As the US is not in first place as far as individual bandwidth is concerned, regulatory structures should encourage competition that leads to improvements to match the level of services people desire.

The FCC says that paid prioritization isn’t going to pass muster, but I suspect the paid peering agreements that have become standard will survive the “reasonable network management” test. They are probably reasonable. The rules voted in yesterday sum up to an understanding of Web as few-to-many broadcast. The many-to-many options for sharing, like Limewire are sued and pressured to shut down, because it is understood that they are for transmission of the few-to-many content. This understanding, and the “neutrality” rules that come out of it dampen the possibility that viral homegrown media on the many-to-many principle will take off and turn into a mainstream phenomenon. If large bandwidth requires transport agreements with all the major ISPs because the open-to-all Web infrastructure isn’t good enough, homegrown peer2peer solutions will remain second class citizens. The FCC decision didn’t take the sort of future it wanted to incentivize into account.

Like Google, I agree that the wireless market is somewhat more competitive than wireline broadband, though the standard 2-year contracts for phones makes it hard for customers’ displeasure to be accurately detected by defections. For example, say Verizon does something so horrible that it makes a significant chunk of its smartphone users to want to defect to another carrier. Suppose it blocks [insert whichever site you rely on for information on the go but doesn't quite compete with them directly, which would trigger the discrimination rule]. Few people could afford the termination fee (Isn’t it $350 for “advanced devices” now?), so protests to the change would trickle in over the following 22 months and would be indistinguishable from other switches. There’s no way to send a provider a message that consumers disapprove of non-neutral network practices.

And the wireline market is way less competitive than this. For most of the areas I’ve lived, including in the middle of Eugene, OR, there were very few choices for broadband home Internet. I didn’t have a home phone, and couldn’t switch to DSL, so….

I have a feeling that the fact that virtually all the public statements are against non-neutrality will have some of the effect that actual unconstrained consumer switching choices could have on real non-neutral practices. The ISPs know that most of the public (at least the segment that pays attention to this kind of thing) is against network partiality. I think this is why they keep their peering agreements behind NDAs. The FCC just doesn’t admit that we, the consumers, don’t have anticompetitive weapons of our own, besides those words.

This week’s Open Education Conference in Barcelona will be focused on sustainability of open ed projects and OERs (open educational resources). I’m not able to be there in person this year, but I am making an effort to try to participate and learn along with the live crew. Here are my preliminary thoughts on the matters at hand. Perhaps this would be my opening keynote if I were the one to give it.

The topic of sustainability has come to the forefront of this field because the organizations that support OER publishing (like MIT and the Hewlett foundation) are often spending a great deal of money to package and distribute them for free, and as the global economic crunch tightens budgets across many sectors, it threatens programs not critical to providing services to paying customers, like the relationship some think universities have with their students. If OER is to survive, it must a way to thrive independent of large-scale charity.

As we turn our focus to sustainability in open ed this week, Stephen Downes published a blog post on HuffPo highlighting the role of OER publishing individuals as provocative forces for change. He says,

“when we look at how in fact open educational resources are being used out there, on the wider Internet, outside the realm of structured institutions and rigid teacher-student distinctions, we see that the students — or I should say ‘learners’, because there are no teachers — are themselves acting as agents provocateurs, advancing their own education by sharing their learning with others.”

His point is good, and the piece is worth a careful read. But I was most attracted to a particular point about how open education can live.

Downes says, “Supporting OERs is not simply about supporting the production of open educational resources, it’s about integrating these into the metabolism of the organization.” It was interesting to me that he chose the word metabolism instead of a more generic term like “learning process.” Instead, treating the learning institution or the distributed learning environment as a living organism automatically invokes sustainability. After all, what does a living organism do? It lives. (At least long enough to reproduce itself.) And from Wikipedia, “Metabolism is the set of chemical reactions that happen in living organisms to maintain life.” So, to sustain learning, we learners must imbue our learning with life. Open education folks like myself know that our learning process is a churn of input and output, building connections across a network. Thinking about a creature’s metabolism and open education makes me think that the metabolism process would not be complete if it only consists of learners digesting MIT’s open courses with no output and interaction. The organic residue of learning should be posts, tweets, etc. that circulate back out through your learning community. Metabolism isn’t complete without breaking down inputs and building up the compounds an organism needs. Putting open educational practices and OER production into an institution’s metabolism means making publishing a part of learning.

But the true message that I got from Downes’ post has to do with the individual learner, not the university. He says, “The vast bulk of open learning resources will be encountered outside the domain of the classroom.” They will work their way into regular life, sometimes when intentionally trying to learn, but also when trying to explore, or when using social networks to keep up on things, browsing or stumbling through your input channels. The question of systemic sustainability is not just something for the major OER producers to worry about, but for the individual learners/agents provocateurs as well. People who support open learning need to build open publishing into their learning to show the process to others, to kickstart the output phase of other learners’ metabolism. This output will inevitably show up in disparate forms, spread across social bookmarking, blogging, wiki editing, and tweeting. But each person doing it sends out tendrils that can connect with others nearby to support network growth.

The result is the creation of a community of living learners. Intentionally self-publishing learners are now but a tiny minority of people. Conversion of informal self-publishing learners to intentional ones may not be such a big leap though. Social networks have given mainstream people publishing tools on a scale never before seen, and the posting of interesting resources is a natural outgrowth of the capability. As the provocateur leaders demo metabolism publishing of learning, portfolios of their documented learning set them apart from others. To date, many employers still credit a college degree higher more easily as documentation of learning than a self-published portfolio, but this is bound to change, as I noted in my last post on “Is Accreditation Working?” at least as a method to differentiate between similarly credentialed prospects.

The output of learners who follow provocateurs into full educational metabolism is a form of OER. Even if most learning output from digesting existing OERs is just meta-OER in the form of links and descriptive information about extant formal resources, it builds a tighter web of knowledge, tying pieces together semantically in the eyes of search engines. Downes mentions Stian Haklev, who is studying OER reuse (and publishing his learning as he goes along). Haklev is among those who notes a low reuse rate for a large portion of resources. This part of the web is in need of better filtering and denser connection. OERs cry out for personal curation by those who are connected to them. Fortunately, I think personal curation of learning materials is a natural part of adapting to 2-way learning metabolism, although formalizing the process involves creating an intention to collect them. For example, I subscribed to packratius to automatically post the links in my tweets to my delicious social bookmarking profile so that resources I find interesting enough to talk about to my followers don’t get lost in the shuffle later. Probably I will be almost the sole consumer of the information embedded in my delicious account, but that resource is available to others who come across it, either through a search into a topic I like or somebody who comes because it is curated by me.

If learning is a living thing, it must sustain the processes that sustain it. The metabolism of learning is input and output, and it builds up interconnectedness. If OER projects like MIT’s Open CourseWare is to be sustained, it must become part of an ecosystem of metabolizing learners. I think this is happening. There is a wider conversation about the sustainability of higher ed business models in general, but I think both quests depend on learning with students who simultaneously and collaboratively document their learning such that it builds up a stronger web of resources. I think, like Stephen Downes, that individuals will lead the way into this potential through metabolizing their own learning. When opened education is how institutional customers learn, supporting OER will be part of the institution’s core functions and will be sustained.

Her first striking move is to point out the unsaid assumption that accreditation works well in today’s economy. Prospective employers evaluating candidates see the name of their college on their university, and its prestige convinces them to assign a value to that educational experience. Anya thinks the accreditation system is working well for those with degrees from prestigious colleges but that it is failing those from non-selective schools and the 60% of Americans who have less than an Associate’s degree. The poorest educated are “cut out of a good percentage of decent-paying jobs” and settle for less.

She notes that a “human capital policy” exists among progressive circles that assumes sending more people to college will qualify them for more good jobs. Of course inflating the number of people holding degrees forces employers to differentiate more strongly between them, which weights schools’ reputations more heavily. (The expansion of available jobs doesn’t immediately follow from increased human capital.) This expands the prestigious schools’ advantage at the expense of those from non-selective schools. You could say the accreditation system isn’t working for them. So in order to distinguish themselves, these disadvantaged graduates have to turn to other means of demonstrating the value of their education and experience, like portfolios of work and personal recommendations.

I wonder how well these other methods are working out there right now. Kamenetz points to them as the way forward for DIY U students:

“One answer I look at in DIY U involves building reputation-based online networks where people can create portfolios and be judged on their actual work and accomplishments, not by the names on their diplomas. The Internet generally makes it easier to hire based on demonstrated skills, not how you look on paper.”

But really, such means are increasingly important for those who hold non-prestigious degrees already, as well as for those 60% who hold less than an Associate’s degree. It seems that an importart step in the DIY U process is learning how to present oneself . But this need doesn’t just apply to DIYers. Unfortunately, for most of those educated in an institution, portfolio-making and self-presentation is not taught, as schools assume their diploma is the major presentation point on the student’s resume. So traditional students need to DIY learn these skills as well.

Footnote: A separate issue is that on the public policy front, we need to not only teach people how to compete for the few available jobs most effectively, but we must also teach people how to create jobs and opportunities for themselves and others through a greater focus on entrepreneurship and cutting down risks and barriers to those opportunities. Creating an economic landscape where a generation of knowledge-able learners create opportunities rather than fill them is the goal politicians should focus on, rather than simply boosting the country’s college graduation statistics. Companies have been reporting difficulty filling high-skill positions as they have aimed for workers who can do more without increasing allowance for on-the-job training.

Here’s an interesting finding I read about yesterday: according to one global measure, happiness has increased in modern times. The researchers proposed a hypothesis that happiness expanded along with increasing democracy, equality and political freedom, based on greater increases in democratizing countries as opposed to stable figures in Western Europe and America.

The hypothesis is something that people across the current American political spectrum could agree on.

George Lakoff, whose recent work involves an analysis of the American political spectrum and the different meaning of “freedom” between the right and the left, would recognize that this hypothesis could be used to promote opposing policy suggestions… either in a neoliberal pro-business, anti-tax, anti-regulation direction or a personal equality and empowerment one.

The link to the Miller-McCune article is above, and here’s the link to the research paper: http://pps.sagepub.com/content/3/4/264.abstract My personal interest in the “freedom” field involve individuals’ ability to access and use information. I think the most important next layer of the struggle to expand freedom and equality is in the access to information. It would certainly make me happy to have access to the best available ideas and perspectives. It’s too bad I can’t budget $35 to pay for one day’s access to the actual study. Maybe if the authors of this study applied their theory to information access, they would have chosen to publish in an open-access journal instead of one with such an expensive paywall.

———–

I have an insatiable hunger for learning and spend hours a day keeping up on developments in technology, politics, and education. I’m passionate about how Internet technology opens up democratic participation in culture, business, and politics and think that we have hardly begun to explore what is possible through our connections with community. I intend to apply my knowledge to projects that aim to revolutionize commerce, politics, and education.

In business, I want to be part of creating a distributed system of community credit clearing that is free from the inflationary growth pressure created by money-as-debt from central banks. I think this is an important part of creating a sustainable economy that can confront the challenges of the 21st and 22nd Centuries. Community credit clearing helps commerce stay local while ideas can be shared globally.

In politics, I want to be part of weaning politicians off their dependence on money by creating open fora where issues are debated thoughtfully and the most important questions rise to the top through community moderation. In order to give force to ideas and policy over partisanship, I advocate for Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), a system that forces the big two parties to compete against others by removing pressure to vote for the “lesser of two evils”

I will be involved in education, regardless of where my other interests take me. I have a vision for education reform both inside and outside of institutions that emphasizes using technology to spread access to information, connecting people and ideas, and abandoning higher ed business models that depend on scarcity of knowledge. My honors thesis at the University of Oregon focused on how intellectual property protection affects the spread of information and culture. I encouraged content creators to open up and spread their work as freely as possible, adopting business models that are not scarcity-dependent. I have applied this thinking to education in my recent study.