1.1 - Guiding Principles and Driving Concepts - Let’s Get Started!

Welcome to "History and Future of Mostly Higher Education" or "How We Can Unlearn Our Old Patterns and Relearn for a More Successful, Fruitful, Satisfying, Productive, Humane, Happy, Beautiful, Socially-conscious and Socially-engaged Future." Our guiding principle for this semester is going to be a quote from the great futurist, Alvin Toffler: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

Welcome, welcome to our course, "The History and Future of Mostly Higher Education." And welcome to my office here at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.

This is a very interesting course because it's not just a history course; it's a purposive history course. By that I mean, we're going to be learning about the history of higher education, in order that, together, and I mean that "together", we can shape the future of higher education. I've never done this before. I've never done a MOOC. I've never done an online course. so you're learning as I'm learning. In my world, that's called DIY learning: "Do It Yourself" learning. And that's not only the method by which I'm making this MOOC; it's the method we're going to be holding up as a model for the future of higher education. And that means that, not only are we going to be learning, we're going to be translating that learning into practical lessons; life lessons; international lessons; intergenerational lessons that we can pass on to one another.

I really believe that we have the potential to be, not just co-learners, but a community of peer-to-peer learners sharing ideas. Maybe that's partly because I've seen Wayne's World and too many episodes of Mister Rogers Neighborhood. I don't want to just be me the teacher, talking to you. I don't want to be what is often called, "the sage on the stage," or to translate it to the MOOC form, the doc on the laptop, with me telling you the truths. In fact, every assignment will be about ways that we can translate the lesson of that week into something you already know in your everyday life, something you maybe do in your own teaching; in your own learning; in your own interactions in the world.

I know, I don't know who you are. I'm told there are tens of thousands of you around the world, and I'm told that you represent a very large number of age groups; countries; regions; religions; nations; races; diversity of all kind. Teachers; students; parents; life-long learners, or what's going to be the hashtag on Twitter for this course and what is also one of the mantras for this course: we are all life-long un-learners. This is the idea that we've inherited habits from a previous age, even if you're 12. You've already inherited some principles and, and precepts from another age. And we need to unlearn some of those in order to think about the ways we can maximize our learning for the future, in order to have better patterns and a more satisfying future.

So in this class, we're not just going to be talking, we're going to be an active community. Fortunately Coursera provides us with wikis, forums, blogs. we'll be using YouTube, we'll be using Facebook, we'll be using Twitter, and we'll also be using the website of the nonprofit that I and others started in 2002 called HASTAC. HASTAC is a long acronym that stands for "Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology, Alliance and Collaboratory": H-A-S-T-A-C; we just call it "haystack". The HASTAC website has groups on it, it has blogs on it, it has many opportunities where you can interact with a community of 12,000 people who have been interacting for a long time sharing their ideas about new modes of learning. And that will be available for all of us.

In order for that to work, though, we have to have some guiding principles. And these are guiding principles that are, again, like the DIY method of this course, both about the method of the class and the philosophy. Here are some things that I'd like us to keep in mind as the driving, guiding principles of this course:

1) History is never static. We remember the past at specific times and remember certain details of the past in order to change our present and create a better future. This is an activist view of history, and I will be asking throughout the class for assignments where you go into your history; wherever you may be; whatever region or location; however old you are, and you tell us about your history so that we can all learn from that history and have more options about our own present and our future.

2) The basic format of the MOOC, the massive online open course, is the doc on the laptop: me talking to you. But as much as possible, I don't want this, this setting to be the main part of the course. I want the real action to be in forums, perhaps in face-to-face meetings, in study groups online, maybe even face-to-face, in all the different ways that we can be sharing as a community. To do that, our first assignment in this course, and we'll be telling you about that more at the end of this hour-long first week segment is that we're going to be creating a manifesto, some community rules together. I do this in all of my face-to-face classes. We, as a group, decide what's going to count as a fair way for us to work collaboratively together.

As you'll see, the reading assignment for this week is to read a manifesto a graduate class of mine created in order to make rules for open learning. One of their rules was that they didn't want to write term papers; they wanted to write a book that would teach others how to do open learning in the way that they had done. What we did in that class was we took the Mozilla manifesto; I'm very proud to be the first educator on the board of Mozilla. We took the Mozilla manifesto and we modded it; we modified it, or we modited it, in order to be a manifesto of Community Rules for our face-to-face classroom. On the Coursera wiki, you will see the Mozilla manifesto; you'll see the manifesto made by my students; and then you'll have a third manifesto that you can mod as a group, and that's all of you, in order to make it be rules that we want to maintain for our community, so we can learn the future together. We can learn as peers; not just from me, but from one another.

I'm going to be draconian about one rule for our community, and that is, no sympathy for the trolls. whatever else we decide as a community about our rules, my personal rule for community interaction is if somebody writes an unkind; an ungenerous; a rude; or a just simply disruptive in a bad way, in a negatively disruptive comment in any of our forums or on the wikis, they will get one chance to erase that comment and redo it. In a more constructive, generous, mutually learning sympathetic way. We all have to realize that we are a community of difference, and that is why we're going to learn so much. You don't learn from people exactly like you. You learn from people who know things you don't know. We have an opportunity, a tremendous opportunity here, to learn from many many different people. To use a HASTAC phrase, difference is our operating system. It's not our deficit, it's our operating system. But difference only works as an operating system when you employ maximum courtesy, generosity, and you learn to listen, really listen carefully and generously to what somebody else says; even if they don't have your education level, even if they come from a different culture, even if they don't have your facility with the English language, even if they don't have all of the amenities that you've been able to enjoy in life. That may be the person who most can tell you what your own blind spot is. But that means if you're a troll, you get one chance to straighten up. If you don't straighten up, you're out; you will be banned from the site. That's my rule.

There's a rule of free speech. Yes, we have free speech, but it has to be also courteous, respectful free speech, because otherwise we can't be a community.

That's our job. That's the first week's first segment. We are going to be learning the future together, we're going to be talking about history, we're going to be talking about measurement, we're going to be talking about many, many different things and how the world changed on April 22nd, 1993, a topic of one of our future sessions together, but all of this is purposive history. Again, to reiterate, purposive history, in order to have a better present, in order to together have a better future. That's our motto: 1) differences our operating system, 2) because of that difference, because of that community, not because of me here doc on the laptop, but because of all of you out there, we will learn the future together.

Let's get started. Thank you.