Ethics for MOOCs: Irony

I'm still exploring Woermann and Ciller's discussion of complex ethics in their article The ethics of complexity and the complexity of ethics (2012). I have found it to be such a rich line of thought, and now Rhizo15 is starting. Actually, I think this is a fine time to write this particular post.

Woermann and Cillier's view of ethics relies on a self-critical rationality that accepts the tension between the unavoidable limits of our knowledge of any complex system or situation and the necessity of acting anyway. They explain the implications of this tension this way:

[I]f we remain open to other ways of modelling and other ways of being, we are more likely to practice a self-critical rationality, to respect diversity, to be willing to revise our models, and to guard against the naturalisation of these models. The provisional imperative, therefore, provides us with a strategy for remaining open to complexity at the same time that we reduce complexity through our decisions and actions. (452)

They posit four operations, or mechanisms, that support and make possible a self-critical rationality, and I've written about the first two: provisionality and transgressivity. In this post, I will tackle irony and humor as an approach to behavior in complex spaces such as MOOCs.

Imagine yourself in a dense fog at night on a poorly lighted street corner in a big city. You cannot shake the sense that something big is about to happen, but you don't know what it is. You hear sounds from every direction—some appealing, some not, most just ambivalent street noises. You can see vague lights of every color somewhere beyond your cone of light, though your own little light obscures most of them. Things move in the distance. You must decide to stay put or move. Decide now.

The point for Woermann and Cilliers, I think, is that we are all in a fog on a poorly-lighted street corner. In most situations, what we confidently know is dwarfed by what we do not know, certainly in complex situations such as MOOCs present, and we can either be scared shitless, or we can see the ironic humor in our condition and make our choices with the full understanding that we do not completely know what we are doing. Woermann and Cilliers argue for ironic humor, an alert ironic humor.

They seem mostly to use irony as "a demonstration of incongruence between what is expected and what is" (455). This incongruence is the slippage between what we know and what we don't know and in the interactions between our knowledge and ignorance. We often seem to think that—or at least to act as if—what lies beyond our little street corner of knowledge does not affect us. This is not so. Complexity demonstrates that very little in reality is closed to outside influences, whether known or unknown. We try to build black boxes that do not interact with the outside, that are perfectly hermetic, but we always fail. All boxes leak, and the unknown always feeds into the known, perturbing our knowledge in mysterious ways until what starts as little slippages becomes a landslide, and we have to transgress our boundaries, expand our knowledge, to account for the perturbations.

Irony helps us to cope with the uncertain results of our choices, and this uncertainty extends far beyond our lack of complete knowledge of any situation when making our choices. The uncertainty really begins after we've made our choices. In her 2010 doctoral dissertation, A Complex Ethics: Critical Complexity, Deconstruction, and Implications for Business Ethics, Woermann references what Edgar Morin calls "the principle of ecology of action". Woermann says, "as soon as an action is taken, it begins to escape from the intentions and will of its creator, and is taken up in a network of interactions and multiple feedbacks, which deprives it of finality" (212). In other words, all our actions reverberate, proliferate, amplify, and wander. They blow back. Once we release our actions into an ecosystem, they unpack in ways that we cannot completely predict or control.

Anyone who communicates publicly is familiar with this capricious behavior of our pronouncements, for instance. My father, a Christian minister, often shook his head in amazement when members of his congregation congratulated or criticized him on some point in his message that he was certain he never made. If you speak in a MOOC, someone will misunderstand you. If you don't speak, someone will misunderstand you. How can you not see the irony in this situation?

Or the humor? Humor is a step beyond irony, a step that I am too willing to take, but it is a tricky position to take in a MOOC, or most any other open system. Humor is too easily misunderstood and too quick to give offense. Much of humor exploits the incongruence between what is expected and what is, and it works when that incongruence is sudden and somewhat surprising. In other words, humor depends on playing with people's beliefs and boundaries and pushing them beyond those boundaries. Almost everyone has beliefs and boundaries that they are not willing to challenge except under the most carefully managed circumstances, if at all. You can't make jokes about those boundaries without starting a fight.

Humor works best, perhaps, as a stance toward the pronouncements and behaviors of others. Keeping a sense of humor means recognizing that the other says things and acts from as confused a position as you do and with no more control over the consequences of their acts and pronouncements than you have. Practice the most humor with those who are the most confident that they are absolutely correct. They need all the humor you can bring.

Irony and humor, then, weave into our behavior and thought processes an appreciation for the impossibility of our situation: we don't know enough to make decisions with absolute confidence, and even if we did, we cannot determine the results of those decisions once they enter a complex space. Still, we must make decisions. We must act. Like all of life, our actions are probabilistic in nature, and while we can work hard to increase our chances, we will all have some fortunate successes and ample failures. Just keep a sense of humor about it, both for yourself and for others.

Ethics for MOOCs: Humble Transgressions

This post was extended by a Rhizo14 article and presentation, but that was fine as I learned some new stuff. But back to complexity ethics.

Transgressivity is the second of Woermann and Cilliers' four mechanisms that reinforce and promote the critical attitude toward complex systems. To my mind, this heuristic is the most important to open learning spaces, and it is also the heuristic most likely to cause problems.

Basically, Woermann and Cilliers are insisting that a critical approach to complex systems such as MOOCs requires transgressing boundaries. From the perspective of the learner, this should be intuitively obvious: if we are to learn, then we must push beyond, or transgress, the boundaries of our current knowledge. No educator would deny this. The problem, of course, is that the limits of our personal knowledge are not the only boundaries that can be transgressed. We can also transgress the boundaries of others' knowledge, especially the limits of the teachers' knowledge, and the boundaries of sanctioned, blessed, or authorized knowledge. Now we are in trouble.

People commonly do not like their boundaries challenged. If they believe in God or global warming, then they do not want others to challenge those beliefs. Especially on issues core to one's worldview, there is no challenge—however kindly or innocently presented—that will not be perceived as a dire threat to be strenuously, even violently resisted. Yet, a critical approach to complex spaces such as MOOCs demands transgression. When we enter a MOOC, we should expect to have our beliefs and our knowledge challenged. Moreover, we are called to challenge and push beyond current boundaries of belief and knowledge. As Woermann and Cilliers say, a critical approach "can never simply re-enforce that which is current, but – as the definition states – involves a violation of accepted or imposed boundaries" (453).

This sounds almost aggressive and combative and a clear contradiction of the humility that Woermann and Cilliers insist also informs the critical attitude. Welcome to complexity. Transgression and humility are irreconcilable forces, and we must act out of the tension between them. We must challenge the boundaries of knowledge, but we must do so humbly, knowing that our own positions from which we challenge are themselves limited and filled with error. Woermann and Cilliers sum up the tension this way: "Modesty and transgressivity … go hand-in-hand, since modesty acts as the impetus for transgressivity, in focusing attention on the possibility of other rules of action (as commanded by the provisional imperative)" (453). Knowing that there is more beyond what we currently know gives us the courage to transgress boundaries. Knowing that our new knowledge, like our current knowledge, will be at best only provisionally true and useful keeps us humble.

We have, after all, small light cones, small knowledge cones. The dark unknown is infinitely greater than the little light within our cones of knowledge. At their most expansive, our boundaries are too tight. This is sometimes painfully obvious in a MOOC, where the 20 or 30 people we may come to know and interact with are only a fraction of the hundreds or thousands in the MOOC. We frame our little MOOC group in large part to make sense of the swelter, but this of necessity excludes the majority. And we must frame to make sense of things. For instance, Rhizo14 was framed in English, but this excluded billions. It talked mostly about education, and this excluded a different billion. We set up frames only to transgress them. Welcome to complexity.

And note that transgressing our frames does not do away with frames—it merely reframes, a point that Woermann and Cilliers pick up from Derrida's Positions (1981):

There is not a transgression, if one understands by that a pure and simple landing into a beyond of metaphysics... Now, even in aggressions or transgressions, we are consorting with a code to which metaphysics is tied irreducibly, such that every transgressive gesture reencloses us – precisely by giving us a hold on the closure of metaphysics – within this closure. But, by means of the work done on one side and the other of the limit the field inside is modified and a transgression is produced that consequently is nowhere present as a fait accompli. One is never installed within transgression, one never lives elsewhere. Transgression implies that the limit is always at work.

If Derrida is correct, then we may be outside this particular boundary, this limit or frame, but we are never outside some limit or boundary. However we frame a MOOC, understand a MOOC, we always exclude something—and more importantly for ethics, someone. I just worked with a cohort of Rhizo14 researchers who truly agonized about the voices excluded from the ethnography we were writing. Our group was painfully aware of the silent voices beyond our ken and wondered how we could speak with any confidence about Rhizo14 when clearly so many voices were absent, outside our frame. We did not have the comforting, simplistic fiction of scientific objectivity to tell us that we were outside the system and could therefore see and account for it all. We were writing from the inside, and we knew that we didn't see it all.

Yet, we still had to say something. We had to tell our story, or let our story be told by someone else.

And other stories have and will be told about Rhizo14. We should expect that these other stories will frame Rhizo14 differently than we have, differently than we might six months from now. As a complex system, Rhizo14 can be framed in an infinite number of ways, and each frame will exclude something and someone that is truly important for understanding the MOOC. This is unavoidable and grounds us in humility. We all can only state our position about Rhizo14 as honestly as we can, but all our positions are limited, provisional, and riddled with error. This limited position calls us to transgression as our frames will not likely match the frames of others and will certainly not be adequate to encompass the MOOC. We will transgress, will be called to transgression, and will be transgressed ourselves.

The unknown, that which lies outside and beyond our boundaries, is vitally important for ethics in complex systems. Woermann and Cilliers note that it is the presence of the outside—the numberless people and infinite knowledge outside our frames, what Alain Badiou calls the non-existent—that gives ethics its potency, its pressing and critical insistence upon our attention. The non-existent is what couples ethics to politics, forcing one to move "to action and do something, even if it is imperfect" as Derrida says. If ethics was only a simple collection of rules to follow, how nice everything would be. But it isn't. In complex systems such as MOOCs, we must declare a position, knowing that it is imperfect and that it will transgress the positions of others. We must welcome the declarations of others, knowing that they are imperfect and transgress our own positions. We must move beyond into darkness and call others to the same transgressions. Otherwise, why be there?

Finally, it is others who bring our ethics into focus—they, especially the silent, unknown others, who make our choices critical and important. We must transgress our boundaries, moving and expanding them to include the silent unknown, and yet this transgresses their boundaries. They may resist inclusion within our boundaries. We are caught between the restrictions of framing reality from political positions merely to make sense of things and the call of the unknown to move beyond our frames to know the unknown. Morin says that we have freedom in terms of constraints, constraints in terms of freedom: "the complex notion of self-organization permits us to conceive of beings that are relatively autonomous as beings while remaining subject to the necessities and hazards of existence" (On Complexity, 113). Woermann and Cilliers say that we must "acknowledge the fact that there is no way in which we can fully engage with the excess of meaning that results from complexity; that our context (i.e. our position) is defined by certain freedom and constraints, which acts as the necessary conditions for action and transformation; and, that we have to acknowledge and exercise choice" (454)

What prevents our transgressions from becoming aggression? The knowledge that we may be wrong here and now and that we will certainly be wrong some other time or other place. There always exist a context in which our current knowledge is wrong, inappropriate, harmful, or irrelevant. It is the arrogant confidence that our current knowledge is Truth for all time and places and people that leads to aggression. This is the case in all human domains: social, religious, political, economic, educational, scientific. When we cease to believe that our knowledge is provisional, the best we can do at the moment, then we fall into aggression, either covert or overt.

Ethics for MOOCs: Provisional Boundaries

Woermann and Cilliers posit four mechanisms that reinforce and promote the critical attitude: provisionality, followed by transgressivity, irony, and imagination. To my mind, mechanism is an unfortunate term, as none of the four seem mechanical; rather, I would call them heuristics, having more to do with experimentation in contact with the real, as Deleuze and Guattari say it, than with a device for reliably and regularly framing the world. These four mechanisms are bricolage for bricoleurs.

Given our incomplete knowledge of any complex system—and I think that all naturally occurring systems are complex as are many human-created systems such as MOOCs—it should be obvious that knowledge is provisional and, thus, the ethics based on that knowledge is provisional. While we must frame knowledge and ethical responses to complex spaces, we must simultaneously hold that our frames are in some way inadequate both when shifted to other contexts and within our own contexts. Let's see how.

That meaning, knowledge, and ethics change when we shift contexts is almost trivial to say. Even children can sense, if not adequately explain, the different meaning in the words "I love you" when spoken by different people in different situations. Indeed, the words don't mean much without a context. Likely when you just read the words I love you, you automatically supplied a context in your mind to help the words mean something. Without context, there is almost no meaning, and different contexts mean different meanings. Most of the world's love stories are based on two people using the same words from different contexts. Much of humor relies on things said or done in the wrong context (this touches both on transgressivity and irony, which I'll discuss later).

But the provisional nature of knowledge and ethics is even more subtle than this as both knowledge and ethics are uncertain even within a given context. Language, knowledge, and ethics never come to us pure, but they are always stained with their use in other contexts. Woermann and Cilliers quote Bakhtin, who says in his 1984 book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics:

The life of the word is contained in its transfer... from one context to another context... In this process the word does not forget its own path and cannot completely free itself from the power of these concrete contexts into which it has entered. (452)

When we say "I love you", we cannot unsay all the other times we have said the same, for better or for worse, in other contexts, nor can we unsay all the other times the other has heard these words said. We cannot even unsay all the times countless others have said and heard these words. Our boundaries leech. Our frames do not hold absolutely against the outside. Perhaps this is one reason we so often envelope ourselves in emotional frames: to insulate ourselves from the knowledge of other contexts, to focus ourselves on taking the desired action quickly regardless of what we know, to forbid our knowledge and ethics from interfering with what we are passionate to do.

Not only do contexts leech the outside in, they are never complete in themselves. As Woermann and Cilliers note (453), Derrida says in Living On: Border Lines (1979) that "no context permits saturation." Woermann and Cilliers add that "every context is open to further description" and "[t]here are no final meanings that arrest the movement of signification" (453). Even when we position ourselves within a context in order to know what we know and to act as well as we can, our given context is open to further description, further interpretation. We can always know more, and that more always changes our knowledge and understanding.

We are always in trouble. We must make decisions, and the frames that inform our decisions are provisional. Most people do not like this tension, and they work very hard to simplify the complexity of life to render decision-making—which is the heart of ethics—into binary choices, into Thou shalt or Thou shalt not, into nothing can exceed the speed of light or you can understand any phenomenon by breaking it down into its smallest constituents and describing its fundamental interactions. Here is my problem with fundamentalists: not that they do or do not have a different frame than I, but that they insist that theirs is the only frame, the only context. Moreover, the true fundamentalists see it as their job or calling to destroy all frames and contexts other than their own. We have a long history of religions trying to stamp out competing religious frames, but we currently have a strong movement among atheists to stamp out all religious frames. To my mind, both are highly unethical attempts to destroy competing frames and to force their one, true frame onto others.

In a way, fundamentalists want to destroy ethics or to reduce it to a binary choice. Fundamentalism always posits absolute, universal rules, which reduces the complexity of ethics to simple choices: either one honors thy father and thy mother or one does not. A complex ethics rejects simple, binary choices.

A complex ethics also rejects an anything goes relativism that says all choices are the same. This is another way to reduce the burden of ethical choices. If all choices are the same, then just pick whatever is convenient. A complex ethics, however, accepts the constant burden of making choices with incomplete knowledge within restricted contexts.

This, I think, is a key stance for anyone engaging a complex learning space such as a MOOC. Even within the context of the MOOC, one cannot have complete knowledge, can't read it all, can't know everyone. MOOCs seem to work better if participants declare their own points of view, while opening space for others to do the same. MOOCs seem to work better when participants constantly reassess their own frames in light of other frames. Finally, MOOCs seem to work better when participants are willing to transgress their own boundaries when those boundaries, those frames, become inadequate to accommodate different, insistent knowledge and behaviors. This sounds like a recipe for ethics, but that's a trick of language—it isn't a recipe, it's a stance, a habit of mind, a heuristic, a cultivated tendency. It can happen in a moment, in a flash of insight, or it can unpack and emerge over the course of many MOOCs. It's a practice that is never mastered, never finished. It's a way of acting. It's complex ethics. It isn't the Way—it's a manner of walking. It isn't the Truth—it's a manner of conversing and mapping. It isn't neat and tidy enough to be a rule, but at best, a rule of thumb. It is not a social contract. I'm not opposed to contracts, but that ain't what I'm talking about.

I'll talk more about transgressions next. It seems that they are ethical after all.

Ethics for MOOCs: Provisional Imperatives

I think I should say something about what I mean by the term ethics, especially as distinguished from morals. In fact, I do not distinguish much between ethics and morals; rather, I follow what Bruce Weinstein says about the distinctions between the two: "[J]ust about everyone understands that both ethics and morality have to do with identifying right conduct and good character. To keep everyone on the same page, and to honor the linguistic history of these two noble concepts, it’s much better to treat ethical and moral as synonymous."

That said, I recognize that some conversations find it useful to distinguish the two:

• ethics are social standards, while morals are personal beliefs
• ethics deals with right conduct, while morals deals with good character (or the other way around—I forget)
• ethics belong to the secular realm, while morals belong to the religious
• ethics are absolute and objective, while morals are relative and subjective

In this conversation, I don't think I will use these distinctions, but I'm free to do so if the need arises.

At any rate, I'm talking about how people choose to behave in groups, specifically MOOCs. Those choices are both social and personal at the same time. They can also be secular and religious, absolute and relative, objective and subjective at the same time. I said in a comment on Frances Bell's blog that "new structures demand new ethics", and Jenny Mackness questions this assertion in her post New structures (MOOCs) demand new ethics? She raises a vital question. If there is no stable, enduring ethical system, then what prevents us from all simply doing what we want to do? Are we left with a totally relativistic, anything goes melee?

Woermann and Cilliers say not, but does their answer imply a new ethics? I want to explore these two questions.

Woermann and Cilliers avoid an anything goes relativism by asserting a  provisional imperative modelled after Kant's categorical imperative. They begin by noting that "the ethics of complexity cannot do more than generate awareness of the fact that we are always in trouble. In other words, it cannot provide substantive guidelines for an ethical system" (451). This is uncomfortable. What use is an ethics that can't tell us how to behave? Doesn't this leave us in an anything goes situation? They answer that "despite not being able to provide a substantive ethics, it is possible to develop a type of meta-ethical position, which serves to highlight important considerations that underscore the ethical strategies that we employ when engaging in the particularities of situations."

What they are aiming for, I think, are heuristics, rules-of-thumb rather than rules. Strategies that can be employed and adjusted on-the-fly as we traverse new territory, encounter new people, and shift contexts across a complex topography, which sounds like most of the MOOCs I've engaged. They capture this type of meta-ethical position, this critical stance, in a provisional imperative:

When acting, always remain cognisant of other ways of acting.

To get a sense of the distinction and importance of this imperative, it helps me to compare it to Kant's categorical imperative, which Woermann and Cilliers phrase this way:

When acting, always follow only universal rules, or only rules which you will want all other people to follow.

So what is different about a provisional imperative as opposed to a categorical one? First, note that Woermann and Cilliers' provisional imperative is a contradiction in terms, while Kant's imperative is not. As Woermann and Cilliers readily note:

The idea of a provisional imperative seems to suggest that the imperative itself is subject to change, and in this regard we seem to be advocating an impossible position. This is, to a large extent, exactly the point: we cannot do away with moral imperatives, but, if we take complexity seriously, we should also realise that our imperatives are the outcome of certain framing strategies or ways of thinking about the world, and are thus necessarily exclusionary. Thus the provisional imperative stipulates that we must be guided by the imperative, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the exclusionary nature of all imperatives.

To my mind, their imperative embodies the very complexity they are trying to address. It dialogically juxtaposes two terms that cannot be reconciled: provisional and imperative. The one term suggests open-ended change and flexibility while the second suggests closed, unchanging rigidity. Complexity says we are suspended between these two, irreconcilable positions, and our lives play out in the tensions between them. No relief, no exit. Provisional imperative is similar to the phrase assertive humility that I used in my last post: a dialogic that suspends us between equally demanding and yet irreconcilable positions. This is part of the nature of complex systems, for as Woermann and Cilliers quote theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen: "a system is complex precisely ‘to the extent that it admits non-equivalent encodings; encodings which cannot be reduced to one another'" (450). Morin is quite clear that these non-equivalent encodings are part of the core logic of complex systems: "the dialogic is not the response to these paradoxes, but the means of facing them, by considering the complementarity of antagonisms and the productive play, sometimes vital, of complementary antagonisms" (Restricted Complexity, 16).

Neither Kant's categorical imperative nor Woermann and Cilliers' provisional imperative is substantive. Neither gives us explicit guidance about how to behave, but I think that the provisional imperative describes a stance that is more useful for determining behavior in complex systems: act as well as you can within the context you define, but always be aware that others may act in different ways that may be as good or better within the same context and that are quite likely better in different contexts, so always be ready to question your context.

This seems to me a useful ethical stance to take in a complex space such as an rMOOC. I must engage a MOOC within my frame, presented as honestly and as clearly as I can. For instance, when I showed up to Rhizo14 last year, I came with a keen interest in Deleuze and Guattari and complexity thought and wanted to explore how both of these might inform a discussion about rhizomatic learning and the community as the curriculum. Given the title of the MOOC, I thought it was a reasonable frame. As the MOOC emerged, however, Deleuze and Guattari were not the central focus of the discussions. Others brought other frames to the MOOC. The clash of frames disappointed and offended some, causing them to leave the MOOC, and the emerging discussions that were often more artistic than philosophical disappointed others. The reframing of the discussion on Facebook and Twitter at first annoyed me, as I don't like either of those platforms, but the others in the discussion didn't like Google+. I could have stubbornly clung to my original framing of the MOOC, which would have forced me to either abandon the MOOC or try to twist everyone into my frame. I'm pleased that I chose the third way: relax my frame and engage other ways of acting.

I claim no moral high-ground here. I did almost abandon the MOOC. Like everyone else, I'm a busy professional, and I could have easily told myself and others that I was just too busy. They would have believed me. I would have believed me. Of course, now I'm glad I didn't leave, not just because of all the wonderful connections, real friendships, that I've made, but because I learned first-hand Woemann and Cilliers' provisional imperative: When acting, always remain cognisant of other ways of acting.

I should note that I did not exactly abandon my D&G frame for another frame; rather, I enlarged my frame to accommodate the others. I still mentioned D&G and complexity, quite often actually, because after all that is the value that I had to bring to the conversation, but my comments were framed not in a narrow, philosophical way, but in a more general community as curriculum way. In other words, I continued to declare the value that I could bring, but I worked to reframe that value into different contexts. I think it worked for others, and I know it worked for me. I was able to expand my understanding of D&G and of complexity by pushing the discussion into different frames. By the way, I also eventually joined the more artsy discussions, which I had at first resisted as they didn't fit my narrow frame. I introduced the haiku form of poetry, which led to a round of haiku among Simon Ensor, Terry Elliot, Kevin Hodgson, and me. Again, I was able to expand my understanding of D&G and complexity and, more importantly, make some treasured friends.

I think this provisional imperative informs Dave Cormier's list of suggestions on Youtube about how to be successful in a MOOC, especially the first three:

1. orient,
2. declare,
3. network,
4. cluster, and
5. focus.

We orient ourselves within a MOOC by constructing an initial frame. We anchor to some aspect of the MOOC—a person, a concept, an activity—and look about through our frame. We declare ourselves part of the MOOC and present. Here we can state our frame, our value, our expectations, our point of view. From this position, we begin to connect to others, to network, and this is where we must always remain cognizant of other ways of acting. We must begin working with our frame to accommodate, complement, or stand in dialogical opposition to other frames and points of view.

This, of course, is where the rub comes in. It may be that we find no one to cluster with and we remain alone. We may have to accept that this conversation is not for us. I'm okay with that, but many feel that we should be all inclusive. I may blog about this later, but I'll say here that I don't agree with this point of view. If a group of people wants to play futbol except for one who wants to play baseball, then that one should disengage or decide to embrace the futbol game, and the group should not feel compelled to quit playing futbol to accommodate the one. Fortunately, MOOCs can be large enough to accommodate both futbol and baseball games, if the players will organize themselves that way. What isn't acceptable is for the one baseball player to stay and poison the futbol game. It would have been wrong of me, for instance, to insist that Rhizo14 focus its discussion on Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome metaphor just because that was the game I wanted to play.

Anyway, the provisional imperative may still seem both too vague and too demanding for many. Self-criticality is a difficult, tiring position to maintain and even harder to tell if you're doing it correctly, and so next I want to discuss four mechanisms that Woermann and Cilliers promise will "serve to reinforce and promote the critical attitude, namely provisionality, transgressivity, irony, and imagination."

Ethics for MOOCs: Assertive Humility

So in my last post I introduced the idea that engagement of complex spaces such as in cMOOCs requires ethical choices. We must define the open, shifting space to make sense of it, deciding what is valuable and what is not, what is in, what is out, and how it should be arranged. We must frame and arrange the complex space, including ourselves in it, and our ethics are revealed in this framing and arranging. This framing and arranging always unfolds with less knowledge than we desire, less than we usually recognize. In complex spaces, we are always acting on the basis of relative ignorance. This lands us in the first complex ethical issue and characterizes the dialogical nature of ethics within the complex domain.

Think of it as being one locust inside a swarm of locusts, far from the edge, and having to make decisions about your place in the swarm and the proper way to move within the swarm. Frame a space of about 35 locusts including yourself, and call it a collaborative autoethnography to give yourself a manageable focus on the swarm. What is the correct stance here?

The first stance is humility. You will never, ever have enough information within your frame to move with absolute certainty within the swarm. The swarm ever has surprises for you that come from all the swarm outside your frame that, despite your frame, is still interacting with the swarm inside your frame. This is always the case.

Like Woermann and Cilliers and Morin, I believe in general complexity as opposed to restricted complexity, both of which Morin defines in his 2008 article Restricted Complexity, General Complexity. Though many in science have accepted complexity and its concomitant incomplete knowledge, many complexity scientists still hold to the nineteenth century faith that we will discover the rules and structures of complexity given enough time and computing power. This restricted view of complexity still believes in the Theory of Everything (TOE). I do not believe in the big TOE. Like Woermann, Cilliers, Morin, and others, I believe that "Complex phenomena are irreducible, or, to elaborate in the words of the theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen (1985: 424), a system is complex precisely ‘to the extent that it admits non-equivalent encodings; encodings which cannot be reduced to one another’" (450).

Within complex spaces, we must always act from positions of relative ignorance, make our choices partially blind. At best, we are less blind than others—we may see 100 other locusts and not just 35—but compared to the swarm both 100 and 35 are near blindness. This is unlike closed systems such as The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (the APA style guide). Inside a closed, simple system such as APA, we can often act with absolute certainty. We should not presume to act with absolute certainty within a complex system. Our lives are overwhelmingly lived out in complex spaces. Simple spaces are the rare exceptions, won through tremendous social effort. In part, we humans have invented simple spaces to relieve ourselves of the unbearable weight of ethical choices. There may be ethical choices about whether or not to use APA style, but once APA is chosen, the ethical choices are eliminated. One cannot make an unethical choice in APA, one can only make an inaccurate or unskillful choice. Truly ethical choices belong in the complex domain.

And they are awful choices, an unbearable weight. Ask the poets and the prophets, they will tell you. What you don't know far exceeds what you do know, yet you have to make a choice. You don't know enough to make an absolutely certain choice, yet you still have to make a choice. This should make you humble.

Woermann and Cilliers define this humility in terms of a self-critical rationality and intellectual honesty "that makes no claim for objectivity, or for any special status for the grounds from which the claim is made. A self-critical rationality is therefore the outcome of acknowledging the irreducible nature of complexity" (450).

But as Woermann and Cilliers are careful to say, this does not mean that anything goes, that one choice is as good as another. We must still do the hard work of trying to understand:

We must still be competent at performing the necessary calculations and considering the relevant information, but we should also recognise that doing the groundwork won’t resolve the complexity and that we still remain responsible for our modelling choices, since each choice gives rise to ‘a different spectrum of possible consequences, different successes and failures, and different strengths and weaknesses’ (102). Knowledge acquisition is not the objective pursuit of truth, but rather a process of working towards finding suitable strategies for dealing with complex phenomena.

We are not likely to find truth in a MOOC, but we might find suitable strategies for dealing with complex phenomena.

I suspect that given the topic of ethics, many will not be convinced if I don't provide a rule, an ethical principle. I think a stance is the best I can do: Be confidently humble, or humbly confident. Do you like assertive humility? We are called to make choices based on questionable, contextualized information, but we are called to make choices nonetheless. Quite possibly another context exists within the same swarm in which our choices would be obviously, painfully wrong. Almost certainly another context will arise someday in which our choices are derisively wrong.

We are in an irreconcilable position: on the one hand, we must act; on the other, we do not have complete information. We are suspended between the need to act and our lack of knowledge. This terrifies many of us. Others reduce their situations to the simple domain. Others have too much confidence in their own knowledge. None of these are the ethical stance demanded of us. We must cultivate our knowledge and value, make choices in experimentation with the real, as Deleuze and Guattari say it, all the while knowing that we may well be in error now and will certainly be in error in some other context.

As Morin often points out, irreconcilable positions are the engines of complex spaces, where we are always poised between life and death, order and disorder—where all the fun is. As he says in Restricted Complexity, General Complexity:

We return again to the logical core of complexity which we will see, is dialogical: separability-inseparability, whole-parts, effect-cause, product-producer, life-death, homo sapiens-homo demens, etc. It is here that the principle of the excluded middle reveals its limit. The excluded middle states “A cannot be A and not A”, whereas it can be one and the other. For example, Spinoza is Jewish and non-Jewish, he is neither Jewish, nor non-Jewish. It is here that the dialogic is not the response to these paradoxes, but the means of facing them, by considering the complementarity of antagonisms and the productive play, sometimes vital, of complementary antagonisms.

A complex ethic does not seek to resolve these complementary antagonisms in some dialectic, but to cultivate the inherent, creative energy in these dialogics.

****

I think I want to add something more specific. What does this assertive humility say about engaging a cMOOC? It says first that you should not expect to get it all. You can't swallow the whole swarm. You won't know all the people, and you won't read all the content. Neither will anyone else.

Each participant will try to frame the swarm as best they can, many as a traditional classroom, which will cause them much anxiety. Have compassion for them. They are using the frames they know for a space that they don't know.

Very few will frame the swarm as you frame it; thus, almost no one will experience the same MOOC. They will structure, interpret, and value people, content, and events differently than you will. Some will see a white/gold dress, and some a blue/black dress. No one's frame can claim an objective, transcendent, privileged status against which all other frames may be judged or assessed. This is especially the case with the facilitators.

You can join a MOOC such as Rhizo14 expecting to discuss Deleuze and Guattari and even find a few others who share your frame, more or less. Still, the group may frame the content and discussion differently. You should expect antagonistic frames. This is often where the most energy is generated, in the tension between opposing frames. You bring your values and value and present them honestly, knowing that others will bring opposing values and value.

Ethics for MOOCs: Complex vs. Simple Learning

I've just written two things that have left me dissatisfied, and both of them had to do with ethics. The first was a long comment on France Bell's post Cycling between private and public in researching Rhizo14 about the recent article she wrote with Jenny Mackness, Rhizo14: A Rhizomatic Learning cMOOC in Sunlight and in Shade. The second was my last blog post Anarchy as Freedom To. In both, I challenged an ethical position that struck me as inappropriate for education in the complex domain, but I did not provide an alternative. It's too easy to tear down and much harder to build up, so I need to repair myself. I want to start a series of posts that I trust will help me think through an ethical stance for education in the complex domain, which I think is the appropriate domain for connectivist MOOCs such as MOOCMOOC and rhizomatic MOOCs such as Rhizo14.

Much of what I will say in the next couple of posts is based on the work of Minka Woermann and Paul Cilliers, especially in their article The ethics of complexity and the complexity of ethics (2012), and on their extensive use of Edgar Morin's work on complexity. I've just discovered Woermann's work, but I've already written much about Cilliers in this blog and even more about Morin. They provide me a fine way to start thinking about ethics in the complex domain in general and about ethics in rMOOCs in particular.

Woermann and Cilliers begin their discussion of complexity ethics with the limitation of knowledge within the complex domain. To understand why knowledge of complex systems is necessarily incomplete, I have to refer to other essays by Cilliers, such as Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely (2002) in which he argues to my satisfaction that "meaning is constituted in a specific context where some components [of the complex system] are included and others are not" (86). This contextualization, or framing, of a complex system means that we limit the system in order to understand it, but also means that much, often most, is left outside the frame. That information outside the frame is not irrelevant; rather, it is constitutive of the complex system and leaving it out means that we do not know a complex system completely, cannot know it completely. Unfortunately, knowing it at all, means contextualizing and framing a part of the system to bring it into clarity. The only knowledge we can have of a complex system is incomplete, partial knowledge.

cMOOCs and rMOOCs engage the complex in terms of both content and people. People, of course, are always complex, but content is not, so I want to deal with content first. I teach college composition courses to help students master academic writing, the kind of writing they will do in their college courses. My college requires the APA style for all school documents. Teaching APA style is education in the simple domain, simple content. I do not mean that APA is easy—indeed, most of my students find it difficult to master—rather, APA is simple because it is a closed system, with a finite number of components, and if one is so inclined, then one can know all there is to know about APA. It's just a collection of rules, tedious but doable, and in almost all cases, there is only one right way to do any given reference or citation. This is simple content amenable to a mostly simple way of teaching.

Good writing on the other hand—how to craft an effective and appropriate argument or how to develop an illuminating metaphor—is complex content. You cannot know all there is to know about good writing, and to write anything, this post for instance, you must frame it in a way that privileges some ways of writing and certain language and excludes other ways and words. If I teach academic writing, for instance, I leave out all that I could say—often want to say—about poetics. I can cover APA. I will never cover writing, and I've been teaching it 30 years. APA, then, is education in the simple domain, while writing is education in the complex domain. I must mix both in my 10-week courses.

When Dave Cormier proposed Rhizo14, he posed a field of inquiry about the community as the curriculum and left it to the community to develop most of the content. He did not do this as a clever ploy. He did this because the community as the curriculum is a complex field of study, and he really didn't know how far it extended. We still don't know how far the field extends as we are still exploring, and to my knowledge, we haven't reached any definitive boundaries yet. There may be no boundaries. MOOCMOOC15 posed a bit more of a curriculum, but it is still quite open-ended. Both MOOCs are engaging complex content: open-ended and emerging. We can frame issues within the field of each, but we cannot enclose the field. We cannot exhaust the field, no matter how long we study. We can only grow bored and move on to other fields. In other words, our knowledge of the community as the curriculum can expand, but it is always incomplete. This is education in the complex domain.

Unlike content, people are always complex, though we too often try to reduce people to the simple domain through the use of labels: you are a woman, therefore you must not understand technology very well; or you are a white male of European descent, therefore you must feel unreasonably privileged; or you are an advanced student, you are a slow student. We do this all the time, but as Woermann and Cilliers argue, our identities are complex—they are both particle and wave, to use a familiar observation from quantum physics. They say of identity:

Our identities are neither a priori nor static. Rather, identity is constituted in a complex network, and must be contextualised as both a temporal process of becoming, and as a point in a nexus of relationships (Cilliers, 2010).

My identity in a MOOC is both particle, a point in a nexus of relationships, and wave, a temporal process of becoming. As McGilchrist shows so well in his book The Master and His Emissary (2010), the problem with being two things at once is that creatures such as humans with bicameral brains can see either the particle or the wave view, but not both at the same time. The Uncertainty Principle of physics makes this inability to see two things at once a central tenet of complexity science: we can identify either the position of a particle or its velocity, but not both at the same time. In the daily push and pull, we humans favor the left-brain particle view, which means we tend to reduce other people to their current positions, minimizing or ignoring the right-brain wave view, their stories. I am not either my current position or my trajectory—neither particle nor wave. I am both, at the same time, but you and I can see only one at a time. The key insight here is that we always view the other from a limited perspective. Thus, all our views of the other are based on limited knowledge and contain inaccuracies.

Moreover, our identity is never ours alone, but always a product of our interactions with and within an enclosing ecosystem, itself a very complex structure. Woermann and Cilliers say:

We act on one another in ways that give rise to our personal identities as well as the identities of our social practices, and that leads to the transformation of these identities (Woermann, 2010). We are therefore not only vulnerable with regard to the things that we value, but also with regard to our very identities. My state depends on the state of others (Preiser & Cilliers, 2010).

I can't know you unless I know myself, and I can't know myself unless I know all of you. My knowledge of you and me is incomplete, and while it can expand, it will always be incomplete. This is a monstrous ethical problem that cannot be transcended, but must be engaged.

Woermann and Cilliers say that our incomplete knowledge of any complex system "introduces an unavoidable ethical component into our thinking about complex phenomena", because as soon as "we engage with complexity, we have to make certain modelling choices when describing phenomena. In other words, since we cannot have complete knowledge of complex things, we cannot 'calculate' their behaviour in any deterministic fashion. We have to interpret and evaluate" (448).

Thus, when I engage the people and content in an rMOOC, I introduce an unavoidable ethical component because I have to make certain modelling choices when describing phenomena in the MOOC—when describing the people, the content, the activities and processes and assessing the value of those things. The choices I make in an open field of inquiry reveal my ethics, continue my trajectory, and yet are also influenced by the choices of others.

This is so unlike learning to use APA style, which involves no ethical choices after we commit to using APA. The questions cease to be am I right or wrong and become am I accurate or inaccurate. I do not differ, dare not differ, from others or from the teacher, but I must do APA exactly like everyone else. Conformity is the only reasonable option, the only sanctionable option, in simple learning. Learning becomes, as Deleuze and Guattari say, an issue of tracing accurately, of competence, not an issue of performance, of mapping, which is always an issue of ethics. Most students and teachers like the precision, clarity, and regularity of the simple domain. It's easy to teach here: accurate or inaccurate. That's easy to grade. I suspect that we teachers too often force some topics that are really complex into the simple domain to ease our burdens. It's like writing teachers who base their grades mostly on grammar. They can point to the rules and justify the 74 grade.

I've taken longer than I expected to arrive at my point: learning in the complex domain is an ethical issue. And ethics are constitutive of complex learning, not an add on. As Woermann and Cilliers insist:

[E]thics should be understood as something that constitutes both our knowledge and us, rather than as a normative system that dictates right action. Hence, the ethics of complexity is not an add-on, but inherent to any real engagement with complex phenomena. Otherwise stated, the ethics of complexity is a structural element of complexity thinking. In practice, this means that we should assume a critical attitude when modelling phenomena, where the critical attitude amounts to both the recognition of, and engagement with, the limits of knowledge (Preiser & Cilliers, 2010). (448)

Ethics is not a list of rules or norms or a social contract or a syllabus; rather, it is a critical attitude, complexity thinking, and a way of engaging and mapping an open field of inquiry, such as the community as the curriculum or critical learning. We make ethical choices in education when we are creating new knowledge, mapping new territory, forking a syllabus, not when we are memorizing a list of rules, such as APA. In simple learning, the ethical choices have all been made for us, while in complex learning, we must make the ethical choices through our own engagement with complex others and with complex content.

So what is this ethical stance, this ethical way of engaging and mapping in open terrain? I'll tackle that next.

Anarchy as Freedom To

I found myself perplexed about the use of the word power in Wednesday's (2015.02.11) #moocmooc Twitter chat, especially by the implication that anarchy is defined primarily by resistance to power and, hopefully, freedom from power. I appreciate Nick Kearney(@nickkearney) pointing out that anarchy as a word starts from a rejection of rulers (though my dictionary says that the word comes from the Greek anarkhos, from an- ‘without’ + arkhos ‘chief, ruler’, so without a ruler, which is not quite the same thing), but either way I have to define power too narrowly to make that concept of anarchy work. I prefer not to define anarchy as freedom from but as freedom to. These prepositions and the directions they imply are important, I think.

My first problem is that I don't think freedom from power is possible, as I define power most broadly as the forces that bind the world together, making life and everything else possible. It takes power at all scales (strings to galaxies) for anything to emerge and to act within a Universe with its own powers to emerge and act. Almost none of the power in the Universe is discretionary—that is, it can't be switched off. It exists, and we exist because of it and through interaction with it.

I know full well that when people speak of power they usually mean human social power in all its political, economic, educational, familial, and religious manifestations. I suppose that it makes sense in many discussions to distinguish natural forces from human powers, but something about this troubles me: when does natural force become human power? or to ask it more precisely: when does natural force cease and human power emerge? Is this a sliding scale with blind natural forces at one end and human powers at the other? Perhaps, but I balk at privileging the human this way and even more at differentiating the human too much from the natural.

Perhaps power is an emergent property that comes with agency and consciousness, when we can choose to act or not, but I'm not so fond of this either as it suggests that most of the Universe for most of the time lacked and still lacks agency, just blindly, stupidly clumping until some random, fortuitous magic happens and self-replicating clumps emerge, leading eventually to creatures with agency and consciousness. This view reduces reality to interactions of matter and energy, leaving out information and organization, which I think have been there all along. So I suspect agency and consciousness, like power, from the beginning. Power, not just dumb forces, from the beginning and through everything.

Still, the MOOCMOOC chat was about power in education, a very human enterprise, so I'll try to stick to that. For me, education requires power. For instance, it took great power (electrical, material, organizational, informational, intellectual, and more) for us to gather on Twitter Wednesday to discuss how to avoid power. The flows of power through that one conversation are truly staggering. We had to assemble a dizzying array of international organizations starting with the Internet, but including dozens of software, hardware, and transport multinationals, each a nexus of streams of power (I relied mostly on Apple, the richest company ever with a well-earned reputation for amassing and enforcing its power). And don't overlook the power of English—currently making as huge a power grab as humanity has ever witnessed—as our Twitter conversation likely would not have taken place without the affordances of that particular power stream. The college and university buildings and our houses or coffee shops that housed us as we chatted are all configurations of power. Sugars ran the streams of my veins and fed my neurons with power so that I could think and move my fingers and converse. I simply don't know how to think about education—or anything else—free from power. For me, power is implicated in every educational effort at every scale.

So if it isn't power in general that we complain about, what particular kind of power is it that we want to avoid? It's a bit too glib to say we complain about any power that we just don't like, but that isn't such a bad place to begin thinking about this. Let's start with the obvious: we don't like power which injures or destroys us or our groups, though the psychological and medical literature is full of exceptions to this generalization. We especially don't like those harmful powers that we think are intentional. Injury in a hunting accident is bad enough, but injury from an intentional shooting is worse. The first injury can be mitigated somewhat, the other cannot and is likely exacerbated.

Next, we don't like power that constrains us, even without injuring us. I generally don't like anything that prevents me from doing whatever I want to do, but I especially don't like those things which intentionally and regularly prevent me from doing what I want to do. My current school falls into this category.

Finally, we don't like power that moves us, even without injuring us, in directions and into spaces (physical, virtual, and mental) that we don't want to go. I generally don't like groups that expect me to participate in their activities for no reason other than my proximity. I don't like those things which intentionally and regularly make me do what I don't want to do. My current school falls into this category as well.

There are probably other kinds of power we don't like, but this should be sufficient for this discussion. We don't like power that stops or constrains our own desired flow of power, but we are least offended by power that flows from totally random acts of chance, more so by power that flows from good intentions, even more by power of carelessness and ignorance, and finally most by the power of foul intentions. As we perceive outside power impinging more on our own power flows, to the point of overwhelming our own power, and as we perceive the exercise of that power as more intentionally harmful, then we object more to that power. That power is more oppressive.

But we don't all find the same power oppressive. While most of us in the Twitter chat enjoyed the power flows opened by the technology and the conversation, some of us—including me—found the 140 character limit to be an oppressive exercise of power. That's the way most things are for me: a mix of power flows that enable and oppress, and I find it most difficult to separate the flows. All human engagements are complex flows of power and desire—some enabling, some oppressive—like different streams feeding into the flow of a river. Separating those streams of power is difficult once you're in the river, especially a really big river such as a nation, a business, or a university.

Moreover, what I find oppressive (140-character limit), others may find liberating. Or I myself may find the 140-character limit oppressive sometimes and liberating at others. How do I sort this bad power from good power? And what do I do with it after I've sorted it?

Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and his Emissary (2009) and Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desire, especially in Anti-Oedipus (1977) help me think about power. From D&G I take the notion that all human engagements, from the most intimate to the most world-wide, result from the desire to connect, to couple, with others to create something new: new pair-bonds and babies to new schools, businesses, and nations, or new MOOCs such as #moocmooc15. These desires—themselves complex flows of often conflicting drives—depend on material, energy, informational, and organizational power to explore an environment and to connect.

It so happens, though, that this flow of desire is not mine alone. As D&G note even those desires that I think of as mine are really flowing through me, coming from beyond me and eventually going on beyond me. My desires are mine more in the sense that a wave belongs to a surfer, or in the sense that my breath belongs to me. The breathing is mine, the breath is not. The desiring is mine, the desire is not. The desire, like the air, comes to me already scented by my environment. I add my own scent, my own desiring, but the stream is not mine alone.

My desiring is not alone, either. Others are desiring as well—sometimes a great many others—and the force of their desiring can overwhelm me, turning my desires back upon themselves and diverting them, perverting them. For instance, I can desire certain activities, directions, and results in #moocmooc15, but others have their own desires, the weight and force of which can frustrate me, leading me to act out or to disengage. I'm much more likely to act out if I cannot disengage. These things happen all the time.

Let's make this concrete. I find MOOCs such as #moocmooc15 and #rhizo14 free spaces mostly because I am free to engage and free to disengage, but once I engage, I cannot ignore the group's power. When engaged with a group, even if merely lurking, I cannot avoid exchanging energy, matter, information, and organization with the group. The group has weight, power. I am stained by the group. Of course, I stain the group in turn, but in terms of gravity, the group outweighs me.

Unless, of course, I have some other power, and this is perhaps what people resent most when they complain about power. Let's say I was Paulo Freire come back from the dead. I could probably sway #moocmooc15 and turn the discussion all by my miraculous self. Or if I was Bill Gates with a billion dollar grant to standardize MOOCs, then I might sway #moocmooc15 again. Or if I was the NSA and decided that MOOCs are subversive and a danger to national security, then again I might turn, even silence, the discussion (I think the billion dollars from Gates is the more unlikely exercise of power here, though the Freire resurrection might be pushing it). I don't know that I as a #moocmooc15 participant could really resist the various powers of Freire, Gates, or the NSA, though in the Romantic novel I'm writing about myself, I do.

Really, I can't even resist the power of #moocmooc15. I've just spent hours writing this post as part of my engagement. Is anarchy, then, my freedom to engage or to walk away? Ursula K. Le Guin seems to suggest as much in Omelas, though she doesn't seem to happy about it.

Well, you've probably noticed that I've not reached closure here. I'm not even sure what clarity I've achieved, but it was fun thinking about it.