Serendipity35

Here are some concepts that I see used as hashtags, which is a sign that they have a following: lifelong learning, lifewide learning. open education, open learning, open universities. Around 2012, when MOOCs went large, the open of Massive Open Online Courses was a really important part of what defined those courses. Today, the open part has been lost in many instances where you see the MOOC term applied to an offering.

I created a category here in 2006 called "Open Everything" as an umbrella term for what I saw as a trend which would include MOOCs, OER (Open Educational Resources), open textbooks, open-source software and other things used in "open education" and beyond what we traditionally have thought of as "education," such as training, professional development and unsupervised learning.

It's not that this openness started in 2012. In 2006, I was posting in that category about a conference on interoperability, iTunes U, podcasts, Creative Commons and other open efforts. It wasn't until 2008 that I used the term "Open Everything" in a post as a movement I was seeing, rather than just my aggregated category of posts. 

That 2006 conference brought together schools using different course management systems (CMS such as WebCT, Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai) to see if there might be ways to have these open and closed CMS work together. Moodle and Sakai were open-source software and schools (including NJIT where I was working) were experimenting with them while still using the paid products. At that time, a survey of officials responsible for software selection at a range of higher education institutions responded in a survey that two-thirds of them had considered or were actively considering using open source products. About 25% of institutions were implementing higher education-specific open-source software of some kind.

On a much larger scale, there were open universities with quite formal learning, such as the Open University in Great Britain. There were efforts at less formal learning online, such as Khan Academy. There was also the beginning of less formal learning from traditionally formal places, such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare.

The MOOC emerged from the availability of free resources, such as blogging sites, that were not open in that you probably could not get to the code that ran it or reproduce it elsewhere but were freely available. 

The Open Everything philosophy embraces equity and inclusion and the idea that every person has a right to learn throughout their lives. It champions the democratization of knowledge. 

In the 14 years since I started writing about this, we have made progress in the use of OER. Open textbooks, which I literally championed at conferences and in colleges, are much easier to get accepted by faculty than it was back then.

Unfortunately, some things that began as open - MOOCs are perhaps the best example - are now closed. They may not be fully closed. You can still enroll in courses online without cost. You may or may not be able to reuse those materials in other places or modify them for your own purposes.

In 2017, I wrote that David Wiley makes the point about "open pedagogy" that "because 'open is good' in the popular narrative, there’s apparently a temptation to characterize good educational practice as open educational practice. But that’s not what open means. As I’ve argued many times, the difference between free and open is that open is “free plus.”

Free plus what? Free plus the 5R permissions." Those five permissions are Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute. Many free online resources do not embrace those five permissions. 

I view the once-open doors are mostly shut. I hope they won't be locked.

It's Monday morning in America and students are headed back to classrooms. Well, most of them are headed out to a school classroom. The COVID-19 virus (AKA coronavirus) has finally put some schools into motion to consider and try to set up online learning in the event that the school is closed.

Of course, if nothing is already in place, it's too late.

An NPR headline about K-12 education says "As Schools Close Because Of Coronavirus, Nearly 300 Million Kids Aren't In Class."

A NY Times headline on higher education states "First U.S. Colleges Close Classrooms as Virus Spreads. More Could Follow." It uses the University of Washington ias an example as they move to online classes for its 50,000 students. This week finds both K-12 and colleges starting spring break, which might be a break from the problem or a time to prepare for the possibility of not reopening after the break.

In my home state of New Jersey, the state posted a directive and "guidance" to schools. Local school officials are concerned about this public health emergency. The NJDOE will count days of home learning toward the requirement that districts provide 180 days of instruction. The risk of exposure to COVID-19 in New Jersey remains low at the moment but the possibility of mandated public health school closures is real. 

The phrase "it's not a case of if but when" is being applied to COVID-19 but it also applies to less serious situations like natural disasters that close schools and even instances when teachers or students need to be home for extended periods.

Newbie schools will quickly learn that there is a lot more to online learning than "putting materials online." Some schools may be using software or a paid platform to post homework and other materials. That's not online learning. That's content management.

In preparing to move instruction online, it is too easily forgotten that training needs to be done for faculty and for students. I think back to the late 1990s when I first began teaching using the Internet and designing online courses. Both groups of users were not ready for it. Some students didn't even have the basic technology from a home computer, fast enough Internet and even smaller things like a microphone for a computer. 

The software we used included a Course Management System (at first our CMS was WebCT at the college) and additional software for watching and recording video and audio and all of it became the major training activities for the instructional technology department I managed. We tried very hard not to be known as "the WebCT people."

I had started in K-12 education and when I left there at that time we had no online learning in place. Unfortunately, for many schools, they are not that much further along today.

Certainly, money is a factor. A school district that provides students with a laptop or tablet to take home has a big advantage over one where only some students have a computer and broadband at home. In the past two decades, not everyone has gotten online or is carrying a smartphone in their pocket.

Again, having the hardware, software, and content online is only part of the solution.

The college that doesn't offer online classes is rare today, but even more rare is the college that is prepared to go fully online with all its courses, students and faculty in an emergency.

It is sad and disappointing that it takes a possible pandemic for schools to think about how they would deal with a shutdown. The capability to provide instruction when there is a weather closing or other short-term emergency should be considered as important already. 

Schools have made progress going online in the 21st century, but not enough.

Researchers expected it a year and a half ago, but Facebook is finally giving researchers access to a lot of data. The data is about how users have shared information, including misinformation, about political events around the world.

The data released last month relates to URLs (38 million) that users shared publicly on Facebook between January 2017 and July 2019. Did they consider a linked site to be fake news or hate speech? Which links did they click or like or share?

Social scientists will also be able to connect that with some demographic information like age, gender, and location and political affinities. There are also concerns that there are distortions, or noise, that have been injected into the data. Why? Thankfully, because of differential privacy by data managers who have tried to ensure privacy.

This seems to echo the last U.S. Presidential election in 2016 when Facebook was hit with evidence that it had given political operatives unauthorized use of its data. In April 2018, they announced that they would turn over full access to information about its users with no strings attached - but to researchers.

It's the right thing to do but a tough thing for a company to do - turning over proprietary information. Previously, that data was only available for research that was either conducted in-house or required preapproval from Facebook.

A cat sits in a box along with some kind of poison that will be released based on the radioactive decay of a subatomic particle. Because these tiny particles are capable of being in multiple states at once (decaying or not decaying at the same time, that means the poison could simultaneously be released and not released. By extension, the cat could be dead and not dead.

In 1935, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger spun this scenario. Though paradoxical, he didn't mean that cats can be simultaneously dead and alive, but that until you opened the box you'd have a cat that was simultaneously dead and alive.

When I first heard back in high school I thought of some Zen koans or stories that are equally paradoxical and maddening.  If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Later, I read that Schrödinger was criticizing the "Copenhagen interpretation" which was the prevailing school of thought in quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen interpretation suggested that particles existed in all possible states (different positions, energies, speeds) until they were observed, at which point they collapsed into one set state. But Schrödinger thought that interpretation didn't scale up very well to objects in the visible world.

A clearer analogy for me was when I heard it explained as being like a spinning coin. While it is spinning, it can be heads or tails. We don't know what it is until it falls and stops spinning. No cats are injured in this version. 

I thought about Mr. Schrodinger's cat and about that spinning coin when I was reading something recently about quantum computing. Schrödinger's cat is often used to illustrate the concept of superposition -- the ability for two opposite states to exist simultaneously -- and unpredictability in quantum physics.

Quantum computing is about harnessing and exploiting quantum mechanics in order to process information. The computers we are used to using “bits” of zero or one. If we had a quantum computer, there would be quantum bits (qubits). The freaky Schrodinger's cat part of quantum computers is that they would perform calculations based on the probability of an object's state before it is measured. Not just 1s or 0s. That means they would have the potential to process exponentially more data compared to traditional computers.

It has been 85 years but people are still messing around with the whole cat thing. Some physicists have given Schrödinger’s cat a second box to play in. This cat lives or dies in two boxes at once in order to consider quantum entanglement. Entanglement means that observation can change the state of a distant object instantaneously - something that Einstein considered impossible and referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” 

Are we even close to creating a quantum computer? It depends on who you read. 

Here's a leap beyond cats and coins that came to me because I was surfing through channels on the television and saw that Christopher Nolan's film Inception. 

A character in the film returns home after a long time in the dream world and we are told that a little top that he sets into motion will keep spinning forever if he is still in the dream world. If it stops and falls over, that means he is back in reality. It's like the old pinch yourself to see if you're dreaming.

But the film has a frustrating final shot because it ends before we know what happens to the top. It wobbles but then the film ends. That ending was infuriating to most viewers. It was like the finale of The Sopranos. What happened?

Nolan once spoke at a Princeton University graduation ceremony and said that "The way the end of that film worked, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Cobb — he was off with his kids, he was in his own subjective reality. He didn’t really care anymore, and that makes a statement: perhaps all levels of reality are valid."

Nolan's point to the graduates? Don't chase dreams; chase realities because, unfortunately, "over time, we started to view reality as the poor cousin to our dreams".

Can you prove that you're not dreaming right now?

That "pinch yourself" thing isn't adequate proof. What if this is a dream that you're stuck in?  Does it matter? If it is, this dream is your reality. 

This sounds like some philosophical skepticism - that school of thought that I once had to study in school and that also sent my mind running in circles. It argues that we can't really know that anything is real. Why? Some would say because you deny the possibility of knowledge. The side I fell on as a college student was that we couldn't make that judgment of "real" because there isn't enough evidence.

That's enough circles to run around in for today. 

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Even cats have been considering what Schrodinger proposed. (image via GIPHY)