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In this Between the Chapters book club conversation, Laura is joined by Mark Guzdial to talk about all things wikis, specifically the collective learning and teaching with wikis and the web.
25 Years of Ed Tech is a serialized audio version of the book 25 Years of Ed Tech, written by Martin Weller of the Open University and published by AU Press. The audio version of the book is a collaborative project with a global community of volunteers contributing their voices to narrate a chapter of the book. Bonus episodes are a series of conversations called "Between the Chapters" to chat about these topics and more!
"In this lively and approachable volume based on his popular blog series, Martin Weller demonstrates a rich history of innovation and effective implementation of ed tech across higher education. From Bulletin Board Systems to blockchain, Weller follows the trajectory of education by focusing each chapter on a technology, theory, or concept that has influenced each year since 1994. Calling for both caution and enthusiasm, Weller advocates for a critical and research-based approach to new technologies, particularly in light of disinformation, the impact of social media on politics, and data surveillance trends. A concise and necessary retrospective, this book will be valuable to educators, ed tech practitioners, and higher education administrators, as well as students."
Credits:
Text in quotes from the book website published by Athabasca University Press CC-BY-NC-ND
BG music Abstract Corporate by Gribsound released under a CC-BY license. Track was edited for time.
Artwork X-Ray Specs by @visualthinkery is licenced under CC-BY-SA.
Audio book chapters produced by Clint Lalonde.
Between the Chapters bonus podcast episodes produced by Laura Pasquini.
0:03
Between the chapters, a weekly podcast discussion focusing on a chapter of the book, 25 years of edtech, written by Martin Weller. here's your host, Laura pasquini.
0:18
Alright, welcome to between the chapters, Chapter 519 98 Wikis. I'm still your host, Laura pasquini. And I'm here with Mark goods dial. Welcome, Mark.
0:28
Thanks, Laura. Pleasure to be here.
0:30
So Mark, I was told by a friend of a friend, Ken Bower is one that was recommended you to come talk to but talk to you about the chapter. And in a preacher, I can see why there's so much about wikis, that your some of your work is built on and had SFAs from the start. So let's let's jump into the chapter and talk a little bit around. What does Wikis mean to you and this kind of world of Learning and Technology.
0:54
So I just got to University of Michigan two years ago, I was at Georgia Tech. And I was asked to be teaching the intro to object oriented programming course. And it was in small talk for years and years. And then I discovered if you were working in small talk, you discover Ward Ward Cunningham. And I learned about his wiki web and I thought the wiki wiki web was a such a cool idea. So when we decided to move the class to squeak a version of small talk at that Alan Kay Dan angles and company had produced at Apple and then took them to Disney. I really thought it'd be great if we could actually do the wiki wiki web in squeak. So in October 1997, I had my third child born, I couldn't write English anymore, but I could still program. I don't know why that works that way. Lack of sleep, you can still program but you can't write English. So I built I built this wiki. It was somebody else had built a wiki, a web server in squeak. And then I built a wiki wiki web based on words design, but just translated to squeak on top of it. And then we put that out and started using it in the class. Bullet carbine. And Jeff wreck, y'all can Rick came to work with me as PhD students, somewhere along these lines. And bullet said, Well, that's a lousy web server, let me remake it. And Jeff said, mark your code, really, and so he rewrote it. And so that became the the wiki server that was distributed with squeak, you can still find squeaks Wikis in different places. So squeak wiki was wiki. And so I think very little of my original code exists. But we use those at Georgia Tech for many years. At one point, there was something like 12 swanky servers around campus, every chemical engineering class was given us wiki. I'm pretty sure that our 2000 paper in CSC W, is the earliest mention of Wikis in the ACM Digital Library. And that paper was about how we change the design of Wikis in response to what teachers and students needed. You know, if you if you've ever used Wikis in class, you know that there's a bunch of things that you want that things like the you know, the the base code for Wikipedia, or twiki, or any of the other basic wiki implementations don't give you like, if you're a teacher, you're going to want to rename pages sometimes, you know, things like put the put the the year or date the semester there, you don't want it at first, but later on, when you're archiving you do, students want to know which pages were actually written by the teachers so that the assignment, you don't think that one of your classmates spoofed you and changed it on you. So we just ended up iterating, iterative development of the wiki model over years. And that's what the 2000 paper was about.
4:00
Well, for those of you that love a good wiki, because it helped, it really did help to democratize what we do in in the world. And in teaching and learning. I think word coming in. I'm really grateful for the wiki because I am an educator, a teacher that use it for multiple times you right, you want permissions, you also want ways you can build on a wiki, reuse and repurpose it continue building out the knowledge that's in it. I think that's absolutely right. And if 2000 is the first paper, half of me and my nerdy literary self is like, wow, do we have a collected literature and a systematic literature review of Wikis? That's only 20 years, as I said that out loud in my head. Not the challenge friends who's with me, anyone I do this one with me. I got I need subside research projects. So that's great.
4:44
That's cool.
4:45
So this is where co lab kind of spun out and this was mentioned in the chapter and it seems like an interesting and simple way to get lots of your courses together and figure out ways that learning learners and educators could collaborate and work. And I love that this the sheltered really digs into a bit of that on to like not just like, this is where we're going to put things, but there's going to be like you have pockets in your co Ed that they're they're kind of engaging in different ways. And it's almost like you're creating that learning environment on this co web. And can you share a little bit about, like, what made you decide that that's the space you wants to have the learning engagement.
5:29
So when I first got to Georgia Tech in 1993, I started working with Janet kolodner, and folks across the College of Engineering on collaborative learning environments. And we did this project with with Jennifer turns who chase now she's full professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. And Jennifer and I got interested in a model that we created that we called anchored collaboration. So, teacher puts up a per a homework assignment, and then puts a link after the homework assignment directly to a discussion about that assignment. That's what we called anchored collaboration. And what we found was in contrast with things like Usenet newsgroups, while that was a long time ago, but other ways of supporting threaded discussion, that when you do the anchored collaboration, you tend to get more sustained discussion more on topic, and fewer threads going on all over the place. I use Piazza now, and I get asked the exact same question about 17 times per assignment. I think that if we had the model of anchored collaboration, that wouldn't happen. Because Where do I ask about this assignment right here and all of the notes related to that assignment is right or right there. So the question that we had afterward was, the anchored collaboration works because the teacher sets up the assignment and the links to the collaboration space, one of the students could make it What have you checked, turned it around and made it so the students could could lead the collaboration. That's what got us interested in wikis, because everybody can author in a wiki. And we didn't actually find that it worked that way, students still tend to follow the teachers lead. But the thing that we found that was amazing with Wikis was that other teachers didn't just adopt this thing. They adapted it they invented with it. The list of things which are in this chapter are all from a paper we published in the Journal of learning sciences, just listing the cool ways that teachers were inventing how to use this. Mindy mullard Stafford at Georgia Tech was teaching a course on Oh, I think was anatomy human physical system, something like this. But every semester, she would have the students identify glossary, words, things that they didn't know about. And then create wiki entries in their class wiki for those glossary entries and provide definitions. This was before Wikipedia. This is Mindy, just saying, you know, my students are always struggling with these glossary words. How about if we have the students build it, and then use the same wiki semester after semester after semester. So now the collaboration isn't just within the class, it's across classes across years, as students are building up this shared resource. And I just love these kinds of inventions. And I think it was amazing that we didn't invent it, the teachers did, because they said, Hey, this wiki thing, I could use it for what I want. I love that about it.
8:36
Yeah, I'm a big fan of the two things. The hot list is one that is talked about. So student generated, I use it for training development course, because there's so many different tools and applications for the tools, they had to do a cross list. And one of these trade development courses I had, it was a wiki that ended up being expanded out across different semesters. So the knowledge from previous cohorts of learners was shared throughout and from across different seminars to and they're like, Whoa, I don't even think about using that. And the anchor discussion like is that one? So I think it's brilliant. Is it one that you found students picked up on? Or do they need direction? So did you give them a prompt and said, this is where we talked about this assignment? Or is that kind of where you felt was the strongest point for is anchored yet still a great principle? So yeah,
9:24
I really liked the idea of of anchored collaboration. So interesting story related to that. So when we first started doing the wikis and the Wikis generally worked at Georgia Tech, they they took off. There was a cool project that Jeff Rick led with an English class where the teacher in the English class wanted to be able to, let's see what was going to blank on the teacher's name.
9:52
Oh,
9:53
I have Lisa Holloway. adaway. So great name. Lisa. Wanted to What did in her class this thing called close reading, she was teaching an English composition class where you've got the reading, you highlight it and write a margin note next to your highlight. And we thought, you know, this is such a great wiki activity, we'll put the pros are pulling that they have to write on, you highlight this part of the text is the thing to comment on. And then everybody comments on the link page. And now the close reading activity is collaborative, everybody can see everybody's margin notes. And what he found, and we actually had all students in the class keep a diary of how much time they were spending on the class. students who've got the wiki version of margin notes actually improved in their learning did better in their final, their final papers, they did more citations, which was really interesting that that was a that was the outcome variable. And in the end, they actually spent less time on the class and the people who did the merge notes all by themselves. So we had this cool kind of invention happening. So a group of us around engineering, decided to go for an NSF proposal where what we wanted to do was use the wiki to connect classes from across campus. So take a topic like computational modeling. We teach MATLAB in the CS class, they learn differential equations in their math class, or calculus class. And then when they're juniors and seniors, they take chemical engineering classes where they have to implement differential equations using MATLAB to solve some big project. How about if we had a wiki about computational modeling, we're all of these classes would post their problems and share their solutions. What we really wanted was for, say, a chemical engineer, freshmen in this computer science class are saying, Why am I taking MATLAB to see the juniors and seniors using MATLAB in their final projects right now? To say, Oh, that's why I'm doing this. Hey, junior senior, can I help you with your MATLAB? I'm taking MATLAB right now. So we wanted these these cross class connections. After a year and a half of the grant, we went back to NSF and said, Nobody is using this at all. Can we change the focus of our proposal? The study, why don't engineers want to collaborate? I mean, we had things like, let's see, the junior juniors and seniors in chemical engineering, we're producing data that we handed to a differential equation class that they were going to do the Eigen values are something other than pass values back to the students to finish. And we actually had the majority of the calculus class except a zero on the assignment rather than collaborate with the engineers. The engineers said, Oh, the reason why they're not collaborating is because it's so hard to write equations in the wiki. So we build an applet that you drag and drop your equations, and then we just drop it into this wiki. From our logfile data, we know that all the engineers and mathematicians that we knew were teaching, we're using the wiki, we're using this applet, and not a single student tried it even once in any of the classes over the course of a semester. So we go to NSF with all this data and said we'd like to change our focus to how could create a computational modeling wiki into a Why don't engineers want to collaborate? So we did this whole big project and found that engineers, so we'd create a midterm exam review, and students would be encouraged to share their answers in the wiki. And we actually had students tell us things in interviews, like, well, I already know all my answers are wrong, why would I want to post or a student that says, Well, I'm pretty sure the class is curved. And under a curve, it's better if you don't help your students get a better grade. And then we'd show them look right here on the syllabus, it says, This class will not be curved. And they said, yeah, that's what they tell you.
13:53
Okay, so this is fascinating to me in so many ways. I love that you wanted to connect not only your students between classes, but give purpose to what they're doing, like you're scaffolding the learning to say, this math and equation modeling matters later on in this area. And let's draw the little breadcrumbs, you're given the breadcrumbs to the next learning experience, the next thing they'll need it for and give it a value. But then you also want to cross pollinate and collaborate in a way but they're like, I'm not sure about this. So why why was there a lack of interest in Really? Yeah, the connection between the classes and collaborate? months engineers? Was there an overall finding?
14:33
Yeah, so the overall finding was that it's about culture. So I told you about the really cool English composition, close reading stuff. Some of the students who were in that class using the the wiki around doing close reading, were the exact same ones in the calculus class, refusing to collaborate with the engineers. So it isn't about the individual style. It isn't about the value of collaborative learning. It's about those classes, it is really hard to create a culture of collaboration. And in particular, we find it in engineering classes students have this sense of it is highly competitive the teachers out to get you. And so they don't want to talk to one another. So we So in the end, it was a story about culture, the challenge is to create a culture where collaboration is valued. So for example, one of the things that we found was that in some classes where the wiki really took off, if the teacher just said, in class, wow, that's a great point, could you put that in the wiki so that we all can have that saved? Doing something like that encourage student use of the wiki, students would use it, they would share things, they would collaborate there. But in another class, the teacher actually looked up a posting that somebody said, called them out in class and said, Were you the one who wrote that? That was such a stupid question. Use in that class now just dies. So the teacher can create a culture in their classroom where use the wiki engaging in collaboration is considered valuable? And the teacher can also shut it down completely?
16:12
Yeah, I would say the teacher modeling some of that, and also validating some of that or invalidating, some of that is key. You're right, culture is everything. I'm a big collaborative learning, the one that studies those communities and can be as a practice and learn environment. And I think it's right, it's about where people see themselves fitting in. Because I work in a industry that we have engineers that we really want them to cross pollinate and collaborate and work with each other and realize, it's not just for you, it's the bigger team. It's the bigger end goal is maybe a long tail project that we all need to like, get into make mistakes, and it'd be okay. Like, how can you fail and it'd be okay. And everything you said so far in the wiki, like you talked about highlighting, we have like an app for that now. It's like hypothesis annotation. We also have like shared documents, what's that Google Docs and everything else? people create share spaces. Like, it's amazing how much Wikis started building that foundation of other things, and apps and tools that we now are like, Oh, my God, these great edtech tools are like, yeah, the foundation was the scaffolding of the early wiki days. And I think your co web is a great example of teachers really taking the reigns of the wiki and saying, Let's go and do this. And Is that still the case today? And I think we both said, is it the case? I don't know. I guess we trained more people to use Wikis than not, is that right?
17:37
Yeah,
17:38
no.
17:38
So
17:41
I'll post into the chat. So all of the Wikis at Georgia Tech were destroyed one day in 2011.
17:48
Oh, no.
17:50
Yeah.
17:52
The FERPA the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. I mean, FERPA is it totally agreed. You want to protect students privacy, you do not want. Here's an example. Barack Obama's daughter is now a student at the University of Michigan. You don't want some reporter putting out a headline, I just checked out and brock obama's daughter is totally bombing calculus, or she just doesn't understand American history, you don't want things like that, I totally get it. The problem was with the Wikis is that you had a timestamp associated with the course name associated with a student name. And, and we tried locking them down, we had a variety of mechanisms, you couldn't get access, except username and password. But in the end, Georgia Tech decided that these were just a risk. And so one day in 2011, I got told afterward, all the Wikis were shut down. So it's hard. I mean, these the kinds of things you're talking about Laura, that we've got these highlighting tools, we have these shared documents, tools, we also have a whole mechanism of authentication and ways of protecting that data. I mean, I you know, I was doing Wikis in the wild, wild west of web 2.0, when we didn't worry about things like privacy and guaranteeing students protection of their of their coursework. Now we're more aware of those things. It sort of diminishes some of the value of the constructionist web, it was cool that, you know, Mindy mullard Stafford students could be making this glossary, and people from all over the world could check out this cool glossary that they were making. But you know, that's a risk now, because you did that as a course thing. Students were learning in this though, that was students graded work that people were looking at, and that's a danger. So I think that one of the things that's happened as we've moved from the early web 2.0 to the kinds of apps you're describing today, is awareness of protecting student privacy and also protect Texting against the spammers and the web bots. And how do you protect? I mean, we were starting having real problems with all kinds of ads to all kinds of medical supplements on the wikis, because it was an open editing box. And this is this is a danger today we've, we've had to evolve our notion about how do we protect students and protect the content?
20:24
No, and that's a fair point. And I will say in some of these conversations we're having in these chapters like this is one of the first ones we start talking about open. NIS, and learning like wiki is one, we've talked, there'll be an episode and there's chapter on blogs, social media, it's having those identifiers. So FERPA in America phip is Canada's privacy. But in general, we're having a world of more guarding against privacy, personal data, and that's not as fair. And so what would what could we do is we want to give students a realistic opportunity to learn and fail safely, and not be watched your surveillance, right or in the surveillance capitalism these days, we also really want to be cognizant of they're going to how they choose to participate is giving them a choice and not forcing them into these platforms and spaces. Something that's interesting to me, though, that still gets used is heavily because Wikipedia, obviously, is one that people will commonly know as the wiki around the world that was built. But there is the ad wiki where learn, faculty, educators, librarians, are encouraging people to contribute to bodies of knowledge that are out there, and seeing that as a value add source. So I don't want to say that we haven't learned anything from these early wiki days when we're just testing in a sandbox of the wild west of the Wikis. What is something that you think you've taken moving forward, if you weren't in these kind of spaces? Now, what's something that you learn from the early constructive as web you had at Georgia Tech?
21:57
I still value collaboration a lot. I wish that my tools were better. And I don't know why. So for example, this idea that that that we started with an anchored collaboration, I wish the piata would support that. I want a link to a thread and so that I can attach that link to my assignments. That'd be super, super useful. And it just, it doesn't exist yet. There are threaded discussion groups in things like Sekai and Blackboard. There are Wikis in these spaces, but they're there, they're clumsy, they're hard to use, maybe they're hard to use, because they purposely want to make it hard to connect to the outside world and perhaps bring dangerous things in, I don't really know all of you know, I really don't know all of what's involved in protecting against these sorts of cybersecurity holes. I'll tell you, so one of the amazing things is Jeff, Rick created all of our wiki and co web infrastructure at Georgia Tech. And then he graduated 15 years later, the servers were still running with almost minimal modification, the only thing that we had is every once in a while, the the people running the the technical staff, the people running the servers would come to me and say mark, we've just discovered there's this new kind of attack. Here's what has to happen to fix it. And I would spend an hour and re remember how everything worked and make a slight small talk tweak. And that was it. The server's ran for 15 years without model. I find that shocking. I think it really has something to do with the the excellent engineering that Jeff Rick did, but also squeaks the small talk model, you know, these things just keep ticking. You know, it's a little Energizer Bunny of code. And I'm amazed there are still switching servers out there. You know, we did them in 1997 Can you imagine a piece of software that still serves people's needs with almost no modification for 20 plus years? I think that's really something striking and I think that's something interesting to think about. Why we evolved the Wikis the way we did you know the changes we made were about meeting teacher and student needs. If you meet teacher and student needs, the software stays useful.
24:28
Imagine that idea which is just giving secrets away on this podcast I
24:33
love it. I also love that like this is essentially what was talked about is co creating a space is amazing because it's this is where the learning lives. It doesn't have to be in something and the the term which I don't know if I love the term splot the smallest simplest possible portal open online learning living technology. Thank you, Martin for that are examples of like Giving power back to what you want your learners and teachers educators to use, right, like pick up the things, the easiest way for them to get in get access and do the things they want to do in the learning spaces. Instead of them. Like, now we co opted go, let's go into this portal, this learning management system, this virtual learning environment, and they have to go, how do I figure this out? We're designing around the practice, and not the other way around. I love that. Um, yeah, let's put our wish list out into the world's market, maybe someone will come up with some solutions for pizza and other other places for us.
25:35
I'll tell you about a couple.
25:36
I mean, one of the cool things was that it wasn't just the teachers inventing new uses. For the wikis, there were a bunch of people inventing new things. One of them that I totally love that doesn't really exist, at least as far as I can tell in any form was a wiki where you could embed executable squeak code, and the code would output back onto the page. So you'd build a little turtle graphics project and students, someone could edit it with the wiki. And then when you saved it, it would render that cool turtle graphics fractal or figure or something onto the page, this idea of dynamic embedded programmable content in a wiki. I really love
26:19
Wow, I don't press it for two and tooth in 1998 99.
26:22
Yeah, yeah, we were doing this between Yeah, 98 through 2001 was really the heydays of making cool things. My favorite thing that we did with the wikis, which is just totally crazy. So the Wikis are just plain text data, right? Plus, like on Wikipedia, like on ours, you can also upload things like so one things we did was allow you to upload mp3. And then the, the web page was a playlist. And we connected the server to an FM transmitter, we had a collaborative radio station. On the third floor of the College of Computing building at Georgia Tech for a while where people could upload their their their things that they wanted to share was a very low power FM transmitter, it was like not even the whole third floor, only half of the third floor could could get it. But then you could turn into the FM radio and everybody could be listening to their collaboratively constructed radio show. Now, today, you do that with Spotify. And why upload the mp3 is they're all on Spotify. But in the early 2000s, this was kind of a cool idea. And it's sort of shared documents. But it's shared mp3 is it's shared other forms of digital media. And I think that we could push further on this idea of using open collaborative spaces to share more than just plain text.
27:46
I love that idea. It's like a shared interest. Like it's a little spot where you can go and create what you want. And you're right, I would say these kind of innovation ideas come from like, well, what if we did this? Or how can we put like you said, How do you put the mp3 is like, I know if there's any any kids listening out there? This is like, what are these two talking about? these things? Now, it didn't work that way. And maybe it's concepts like this. And maybe we need to ask the questions of how do we do this more? And what would this look like if we had to create this space now, and own this space is I think something we were thinking about as the web evolves even more. I talked with Jim chrome about the web earlier in the earlier chapter. I'm thinking about what we need for the future as we create spaces or need to create spaces online that we own and doesn't own us, I guess, in a way. So I think foundationally this is kind of like the bedrock of some of the things where the end of it. This chapter talks a bit about commercial publishing some other models broadcast the dominated and learning, but this is really a place where people can come together and write pages, not just plain text, and you said put things in there that meant meaning meaning to them and also got to choose their own learning adventures. I like Yeah,
29:09
yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
29:10
That was a lot was going on, too.
29:13
questions we have from Martin, he claims that you're the Convert. He claimed at a conference in 1988, that he came back to the Open University being at New convert to the potential idea of Wikis. What did you take from those early days of learning to now that you're kind of thinking, Hmm, I wish we have this still. Or maybe we should think back to this way of doing things.
29:40
I think that there needs to be both technology advances, but also policy changes. You know, one of the things that I I've always been inspired by the work of Seymour Papert, as many of us have, and his definition of constructionism What what what is construction is I see the the Wikis as a constructionist learning environment. So he said that constructionism the word of the end not the word with a V. constructivism is this way how we understand learning assimilation, accommodation, Piaget all that stuff. That construction ism is this idea that this happens. And I love Seymour's phrase, especially, especially felicitously. You know, not not a data is especially felicitous if you're creating a public artifact, whether a sandcastle on the beach or a theory of the universe that was in his original definition. So mean an externalization of your knowledge and artifact representing your knowledge? Sure. wikis, drawings, spreadsheets, all of that works, but the public nature, how do we make things shareable in public? You know, students would tell us in the early days of the swiftkey, the CO lab, the collaborative websites that Oh, yeah, I had my aunt come visit my page last week, right that it was really easy for students to build things to share, and that they could involve their family and their community. These days, I were along the days that we first hired Amy Brockman from the MIT Media Lab, who's still at Georgia Tech, she built this cool thing called moose crossing. Y'all may remember muds and moves these, you know, programmable, text based adventure games. He built a version of these that was programmable in a form of logo. And she filled the space with kids under the age of 12. So you have these young kids creating their own world. And that was her idea for moose crossing. And she did this really cool paper with. So and by the way, she and Andrea forte, her PhD student did a lot of the early studies about who are the people who are editing Wikipedia? what's the what's the life of a Wikipedia and what are the what are they thinking about? Who How does somebody get recruited into becoming a Wikipedia author and editor. But she also did this cool paper with Jose Seagal about Samba schools. That was something that Seymour Papert highlighted that Samba schools through this multi generational learning activity. And wasn't that such a powerful and interesting thing. And we saw some of that with this Wikis that I'm building this thing. And I know the kids who built it last year. And I know that I'm building it. So the kids who take this class next semester will have something useful. And I'm involving my family, and they're going to come visit what what I'm doing. And I love this idea. I totally get the privacy concerns. But I also love the ability of creating for other people, and that I know the people who created here before me. And I wish that we could have ways of protecting the kids privacy, but still encourage that notion of sharing across generations and knowing that, who took the class before you and they're contributing to you now, and who's going to take the class after you and we're engaging with our families and our families can come see, yeah, this is cool thing that you're doing in your class. That kind of interconnectivity requires more than technology. It requires changes in policy and culture.
33:25
And it also as you talk about reminds me of it teaches our each other how to be civically engaged, like we're all connected in different ways. And what we do now matters for the future and the past. And it has so many other kind of learning ties, because he described I was like, we could really use more of these mu or mud like environments to do some of the practice and skills like there'll be technical skills learned, but there's also your rights, social, cultural, perhaps even civic engagement skills. Yeah, yeah.
34:00
Yeah. All right, Mark,
34:01
it's been a delight to chat with you. Is there anything else that you want to think on? I knew he asked a question for Martin, we throw it back to him. Is there anything else that I didn't ask you about that you want to mention?
34:12
So a question for Martin to think about. I have always been impressed by the open us open us culture. It's development. I have on my my shelf some of the mark eisenstaedt books about knowledge media. I'd love to hear how they see how the open EU is now using these new technologies and what they can share with more traditional universities. mean the open EU is always invented these wild and cool technologies because they have such a unique kind of clientele. I mean, it's not so unique anymore if you start thinking about Udacity, and Coursera, and edX, but still, those still serve a more specific pocket. I mean, there's all these studies, Justin Reich's new book, all of his focus on the people who are taking the MOOCs tend to be, you know, elite is more elite, more well educated already more wealth, the open view has always served everybody, right. And they're using technology to serve everybody. So how do we take some of that to inform, for example, I teach a class of 340 at a traditional brick and mortar institution, University of Michigan, and we are all remote, we are all online. I'm having to use tools that we've used in the past like Canvas, the car Blackboard, but you know what, up at the open, you could tell me a lot about how to deal with the pandemic. And there are tools that they have, that I could really use. So I sort of turn it around to say, okay, open you embrace these ideas of things like Wikis. Okay, now, tell us what we ought to be doing. Because we're all now facing the kind of learning situation that the open EU has always faced?
36:03
I'll share that question with Martin. But I do think I'll come back to that C word. I do think it is around culture, and kind of how it's presented. And it's something that I will think of from this conversation, but hey, man, answer the question. All right. Okay. Maybe he'll blog about it. And give us an answer. Mark. Thanks so much for that. Thank you so much for your time and chatting about this chapter. I really appreciate it and yeah, it was really fun.
36:26
was a pleasure for me to thanks so much for having me.
36:30
You've been listening to between the chapters with your host Laura pasquini. For more information for to subscribe to between the chapters and 25 years of edtech visit 25 years dot open ed.ca