Douglas  H.  Fisher  

Lifelong Learning on the Web Becoming part of the crowd

Presentation to OSHER Lifelong Learning Institute

July 8, 2013

Douglas H. Fisher Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning

Vanderbilt University

Outline and Themes

•  A Survey of MOOCs and Signing Up for One

•  Global and local Discussions in Massive, Open, Online Courses (MOOCs)

•  A culture of sharing cognitive surplus and generosity

•  Wikipedia and Wikibooks (Videos aren’t the only form of content)

Douglas  H.  Fisher  

Screenshot of https://www.coursera.org

Examples of MOOCs

Douglas  H

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Screenshot of https://class.coursera.org/ml-2012-002/class/index

Examples of MOOCs

Douglas  H

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Screenshot of https://class.coursera.org/sustain-2012-001/class/index

Examples of MOOCs

Douglas  H

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https://www.coursera.org/course/maps

A MOOC that I have signed up for!

Daphne Koller: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6FvJ6jMGHU (12:14–14:09)

•  Global and local learning communities

Doug Schmidt (Virtual Office Hours) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAscOxl5Vss&feature=c4-feed-u (35:43)

•  Global and local learning communities

Douglas  H.  Fisher  

A Culture of Sharing

•  Jonathan Zittrain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P65XdTlk4vA

•  Clay Shirky: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu7ZpWecIS8

•  Chris Anderson: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html

Examples of Crowdsourcing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P65XdTlk4vA (4:04 – 9:00)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu7ZpWecIS8 (0:00 – 6:50)

Wikipedia Article on Pluto

Media2on:  Focus  on  the  ar2cle  itself  

Wikipedia Talk on Pluto

Click  on  Talk  for  discussion  among  contributors  

Article revision history

.    .    .    

h=ps://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ar2ficial_Intelligence_for_Computa2onal_Sustainability:_A_Lab_Companion  

Artificial Intelligence for Computational Sustainability: A Lab Companion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P65XdTlk4vA (9:10 – 14:10)

Douglas  H.  Fisher  

Diversity Trumps Ability*

•  Diverse individuals bring different perspectives and heuristics to problem solving.

•  Work can be structured to avoid the negative aspects of diversity, such as disruptive conflict, miscommunication, and interpersonal biases.

•  Diversity can result in better solutions than those produced by a group of like-minded individuals.

* Page, S. 2007. Making the Difference: Applying a Logic of Diversity, Academy of Management Perspectives, 21(4): 6-20.

Douglas  H.  Fisher  * Page, S. 2007. Making the Difference: Applying a Logic of Diversity, Academy of Management Perspectives, 21(4): 6-20.

Conditions for Diversity Benefits*

•  Condition 1: the problem is difficult and cannot be solved by a single person,

•  Condition 2: all problem solvers bring relevant and diverse perspectives,

•  Condition 3: some problem solver can find an improvement on the existing or a suggested solution,

•  Condition 4: the pool of problem solvers is reasonably large,

•  Condition 5: individuals can contribute to the whole without participating in collaboration.

*  Condi2ons  1-­‐4  from  Page  2007  

Ideal, Reality, Fix

Ideal: that the social construction of knowledge be conjunctive

Reality: that individual humans treat it as disjunction, in whole or part (leading to content fragmentation or very slow synthesis)

Fix: that an AI can restore the ideal by synthesizing across (semi-)independently made contributions

Proposals

•  An OSHER course that is wrapped around a MOOC

… with local faculty and student facilitators

•  Putting OSHER student material online (we can all be contribute content)

•  Train and unleash a generation of Wikipedians

•  Write a collective Wikibook

Douglas  H.  Fisher