Reda Sadki’s Updates

The publicness of learning

I've been reading Jeff Jarvis's Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves How We Work and Live. It raises some interesting questions for educators.

Scholar is a private space, for example. As I understand it, publishing to the bookstore is the endpoint in a process, and sharing (publicness) is constrained to contribute to the process of peer review.

However, in the Digital Age, anyone can share anything. Expression, thinking, writing... it's all public unless we go out of our way to ensure that it's not. And even then, it probably is or can become public with the flip of a switch (think Facebook's privacy settings). Also, multimodal spaces like Wikipedia allow anyone to contribute.

Publicness can collapse elaborate schemes of authority. In the past, publishing was a costly activity reserved for experts through established and culturally-accepted means by which one acquired and had this expertise recognized. Those costs are now marginal enough that companies like Facebook or Tumblr will give anyone the means of public content production (in exchange, of course, for data mining into our private lives). Suddenly, having the means of production does not require you to be an expert.

I just read Professor Cope's comment where he explains that Scholar is a private social network, disconnected from Facebook and other networks of publicness, for legal reasons and because he believe there needs to be a separation for learning spaces from those where people engage in social interactions that does not have the explicit purpose of learning.

For example, with the learning theorist assignment, what woudl be the implications if part of the assignment was to edit the Wikipedia page for our thinker? In my case, I chose Robert Gagné, about whom I had previously read no more than three papers or articles. That certainly does not qualify me as an expert. I would claim that I learned quite a bit through the reading I then did to prepare the article. Did I learn anything that would make me a useful contributor to the Wikipedia page? Is it in the interest of learning for me to make public what I wrote -- whatever its quality -- so it ends up in the Google's search index and perhaps shows up for someone else looking for info about this learning theorist? My initial reaction is that my exploration and thinking about Gagné -- and the attempt to turn this into an article in Scholar -- had best remain private. But I get the feeling that Jarvis and other proponents of publicness might argue otherwise.

  • Reda Sadki
  • Lauren Mark
  • Miriam Larson