12 thoughts on “openness and monolithicity”

  2. D’Arcy, does this diagram refer to the set up at your institution? (the wiki one through me a bit as I think of these generally as extending from open to closed)

    1. I guess it’s specific to my institution – the wiki we have is MediaWiki, so it doesn’t have any concept of privacy. It’s all public/open. Some faculty want closed/private wikis, but I can’t support more than 1 wiki, so they’re on their own for that.

  3. looking at the diagram again, it hits me. none of these things are anything that a faculty member cares about. they’re what _we_ care about, but all a prof wants to do is teach. how to reconcile this?

    1. I’d guess that most instructors want a container to dump their content in. Most instructors (again, this is just my guess) are probably thinking of a fairly linear consumption of content by the students, more or less replicating the standard and pedagogically embalmed lecture model. It’s the path of least resistance to what they see as the task of putting their class online (and if you want to read some trenchant criticism of this notion of putting a class online, see David Wiley’s Polo Parable). This is why Blackborg does so well – it’s allows creation of boilerplate courses without much hassle.

      If we think that the lower right quadrant is where the rich learning can happen, we (well – mostly you. I’m just a lowly high school teacher) need to set up the templates for taking the online courses in that direction. Make *that* the path of least resistance.

      You’ve been on a real tear with your writing on your blog for the few days and some of your posts have given me a lot to think about. Thanks for that.

    2. Professors bring different values into their teaching. If you link values the professor has to the different quadrants of the diagram, then I think that helps make it relevant to them. Additionally, I think it is worth bringing up the advantages/disadvantages of each quadrant. You may never show them the diagram, but it may help refine your thinking and how your present the concept of openness to them.

  4. I like the idea, not as crazy on some of the specifics of the diagram, if I get some time I will try to do my own version, but there are at the very least these two variables (“monolithicity” seems a mouthful; I want to say “Extensibility” but that’s not right) on which to place solutions. So let’s keep working on this, because to me at least, visual matrices like these can be incredibly powerful (when not overly reductive) in helping people quickly grasp competing variables in their choices.

    1. yeah. it’s not really working for me either. “monolithic vs. splj” was supposed to tease out level of individual control, and ability to integrate with other stuff. Difficult in Bb. Easier with WP (even if it’s just embedding YouTube videos, etc…)

  5. it just hit me – relabeling the axes as “privacy” and “control” might make more sense to faculty and students. some minor rejigging of the blobs is needed, but not that much…

  6. >relabeling the axes as “privacy” and “control” might make more sense to faculty and students

    In the diagram I’m not sure why WP Public is so much deeper than WP Private on the ‘conjoined’ / control axis. Is it because there are more possibilities for pieces (eg RSS feed inputs) on a public site?

    1. yeah. the thinking behind that was that public sites are easier to reuse in other contexts, because of RSS. It’s highly unscientific though – so the blobs could easily be moved around based on pretty much anything…

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