5.2 - 4) Make! From Critical to Creative Contribution

Hi, welcome back. It's Week 5, Session 2 of "The History and Future of Higher Education". Last time, we were talking about curriculum. Today, we're going to be talking about changing the paradigms of pedagogy.

A pedagogy basically means the science and art of education or instructional theory. So from a Greek word meaning child and lead, and typically when we talk about pedagogy we mean leading the child. In fact, the pedagogy that informs this course, this MOOC, switches that and talks about the ways the child becomes the leader. This is a pedagogy grounded in the work of some very, very important educational theorists. The educational theorists are Jean Piaget, who's known as a cognitive theorist and a social theorist; Vygotsky who believed that education was deeply tied to the kind of society we had; and the single most important theorist in forming what we're doing in this class is the great educational theorist of democracy, John Dewey, who very much believed in a functional idea of psychology and a functional idea of education. By that, I mean how you translate an idea into a practice. His idea was that in that act of of translation from idea to practice-- from somebody else telling you what to do to you actually doing it-- that's where real learning happened. That's where you, actually into the fiber of your being, start to assimilate a new kind of learning.

In our textbook, which, of course, is a student-created textbook-- so it exemplifies Dewey's theories-- you can find an essay by two doctoral students at North Carolina State University: Barry Peddycord and Elizabeth Pitt. What they do is they take probably the single most important essay about theorizing the internet, Eric Raymond's famous essay, The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Open Classroom, and turn it into an educational essay. Raymond's essay basically says there's one kind of architecture that's the architecture of a cathedral: it's top down, it has blueprints, it's fixed. There's another kind that's a bazaar, which kind of happens haphazardly; anyone can contribute; you don't know what's going to be on the table next. The cost is determined by the interaction between the two people, and that is his metaphor for the Linux system and the open online learning system inaugurated on-- our date, again-- April 22nd, 1993 when the Mosaic 1.0 browser went public. And what Barry and Elizabeth argue in their essay is that that bazaar model can also be translated to education.

Those are the 3 pedagogical principles we're going to be emphasizing today, starting with-- and this comes now as fourth in our 10 paradigms for how to change the future of our education-- the idea is quite simple, one word: make.

4. Make: Move from critical thinking to creative contribution. Now, by that, I do not mean get rid of critical thinking; I think critical thinking is extremely important. It's one of the most important skills we can teach to anybody. But for me, critical thinking is not the endpoint; it's the beginning for action. So you teach people how to take an argument; to take a stance; to take an idea and be able to tell if it's logical; be able to find out what its assumptions we have, we are to be able to critique it, but then to use the power that comes from being able to critique a powerful idea and a basic ideology or idea to then move on and do something else.

Here are 2 examples of making that I think embody a kind of ideology, as well, and we embody the idea of going from critical thinking to creative contribution.

1) You'll see this in the website that we've put up on the MOOC for you is the Digital AIDS Quilt under the leadership of one of our HASTAC steering committee members and co-founders, Anne Balsamo, who's a dean at the New School in New York City. The AIDS quilt, as you may know, the actual physical AIDS quilt is 48,000 panels. Each panel has 8 or even 64 other smaller panels within it. The AIDS quilt project was begun in 1987 to commemorate all those who had died of AIDS. And it's so huge there's no way to physically display it at one time. So what Anne and her team have started to do is they started to photograph each of the squares of the quilt and put those into a database. And they welcomed the world, literally, to contribute ideas; photographs; stories to that database. So that even though the quilt itself may not be displayed, you or I can go to the website, click on it, and find out information about the quilt. But the make part is that you and I can also contribute information to the quilt: we can correct each other; we can edit each other; it's similar to Wikipedia in that. But what it does is it says, AIDS isn't something over there, it's not just a historical event. It's something we're part of, it's part of our history, it's something we're contributing to, it's something we're making. And in Dewey's idea that's where real learning happens. In Vygotsky's idea that's where the act of learning and the act of social change go together. Because, of course, in commemorating those who've died of AIDS you're also having a whole ideology about AIDS as medicine and ending aids, about the importance of a social movement to make AIDS drugs available worldwide. Prevention, and certainly respect for and responsiveness to all the different communities of people who are susceptible to AIDS; and that means all of us; it's not simple sub-groups, it's all of us. And so that alone in the spirit of making and adding to the AIDS quilt, we also educate ourselves so that we are part of the community that is being remade by this simple act of contribution and, again, moving from critical thinking to creative contribution.

Another example of moving from critical thinking to creative contribution is one that I'm engaged in right now. This is a project we call CI-BER. It's funded partly by the National Science Foundation and partly by a grant from Duke University in our new program called, Vast Connections. CI-BER stands for Cyber Infrastructure for Billions of Electronic Records-- and again, we'll show you on the MOOC site-- we're working with a small community in Asheville, North Carolina-- the south side community-- that was pretty much decimated by so-called urban renewal. Richard Marciano, my colleague at the University of North Carolina and a computer scientist, read that the hand written census documents of urban renewal from about 1964 to 1984 had been donated to the University of North Caro, Carolina Asheville library. And he wrote to the library and volunteered to digitize those materials so that the community that had been decimated, as recorded in those census and red-lining documents, could in fact find information about themselves online. He and colleagues have created a geo-located GIS system called Big Board which literally allows you to click on an address in the south side Ashville community of a house that may not even exist any longer, and to then look through at the records and find more information about that; it's almost a virtual re-creation of a community.

This semester, with my students in an independent study that we're calling "Making Data Matter", we'll be improving the technology of the Big Board system. We'll be working with community leaders led by Priscilla Nadya in the south side community of Asheville and collecting stories, photographs, memorabilia, diaries, newspaper stories from the Ashville community and putting those into the Big Board map, too, so that future generations don't have to look back and say our community was lost, but can say, "Yes our community was decimated by so-called urban renewal, but we still exist. We have a history. We have a posterity."

The most exciting part, to me, about this Making Data Matter project is it, not only teaches technology and ethics together, not only teaches community action and how you work between academics; humanists; scientists and community members, but it also teaches us how those things can be used for policy. The mayor of Asheville is very interested in this project, some of her relatives were themselves decimated, their homes were decimated in the urban renewal, and she's interested in how that history can help inform the future policy of Asheville. Asheville's a very beautiful little tourist town it's quite prosperous now. How do you make a town prosperous without destroying your, your poorest citizens? How, in fact, does the prosperity of a town help everybody and, in fact, not be build on the destruction of the community of your poorest members? So that, to me, is a really wonderful example of Vygotsky, Piaget, and Dewey altogether where functional psychology and a social purpose all work together.