Monthly Archives: April 2015

Learning subjectives (#rhizo15)

A drawing I made for #rhizo14, last year

I’m partially participating in Website for #rhizo15, an open, online course in rhizomatic learning. During week one, we were asked in a video posted on that site to think about learning subjectives in addition to (instead of?) learning objectives.

The idea seems to be this: we can never be certain exactly what is going to happen in a learning situation, where we’re going to go; we can have a general outline, but things take on a life of their own when we are learning with others. And even the clearest learning objectives are going to be taken differently, interpreted differently, experienced differently by different people.

Here are a few quotes from the video for week one posted on the #rhizo 15 website that are helping me get a handle on what the topic of discussion is:

How do we think about learning and designing for learning when we don’t know where we’re going?

…learning is an uncertain process, life is an uncertain place, right answers are things that will only exist in storybooks.

How do we still provide enough structure that people know what we’re talking about?

It is that last point that I really want to focus on here.

I agree with the point that we can’t ever know exactly where we are going to go in learning, and that everyone’s learning experience will be different. Those things seem quite clear. But I worry that at times we might move from there into saying, well then, let’s embrace the chaos and give the least amount of structure possible.

Kind of like the #rhizo15 course itself, for which the idea of the “community as the curriculum” is embodied in (at least) the fact that the only curriculum given by the person who started the course consists of short videos with thought-provoking ideas and questions. What else happens rests entirely on the actions and conversations of the participants–what they talk about, what tools they decide to use to do so (e.g., see this Vialogues discussion about week 2’s video), what artifacts they create. Who would have guessed ahead of time that a blog post with a dialogue (by Tania Sheko) would have led, within about a week or so, to the creation of a radio play? (A project I missed while I was at a conference, and am very sad about missing!)

Now, I’m not knocking this lack of structure as if it’s never appropriate. I think it works great for a course like this, one that people join into because they are simply interested, have some time to dedicate to it, want to connect with others who are thinking about these topics, etc. And it works well for thinking about one’s lifelong learning in general, as evidence by Sheko’s dialogue on her blog. Of course I can’t know for certain where my life is going to go, so it makes no sense for me to have rock-solid learning objectives ahead of time.

But it seems to me that the situation is, perhaps rightly, different for students who are paying for courses for which they are being evaluated in ways that attach to a record that is important for their future. I feel a moral imperative to provide enough structure in a course that they can have a good sense of what they need to do in order to earn the grade they hope to earn. There is a strong power imbalance going on in a “traditional” course where I am in charge of giving grades, and if they don’t get enough information about what the expectations are then I feel like I would be being unfair to them. So it’s vitally important to me to figure out a way to recognize and value the fact that learning is uncertain, and that it would be best if students can find their own paths and their own means of learning (with the community of the rest of us in the class) while still having enough structure that students can have a fair sense of how they will be evaluated and what to do to achieve the marks they hope to achieve.

Now, if learning subjectives are mostly a matter of giving students more choice, more freedom to decide what they want to focus on in classes, then I’m all for that. As Laura Pasquini puts it in a recent blog post,

The openness of learning subjectives provides opportunities for students to drive the course agenda and direct their interests for topics.

This is something I think would be great to do, and I haven’t done as much of that as I’d like in the past. I have offered students the choice of more than one kind of assignment to do in one of my courses (a paper or a more creative project), and I’m also experimenting, in upcoming courses, with students choosing how they want their course grade to be calculated–which assignments to count for what. I also want to involve students more in assessing their own work (I already have them engage in peer feedback quite often), so that they take more ownership of it than just relying on the instructor to assess it.

I’m also happy to say to my students that I’m not sure where our discussions of philosophy or literature are going to go, that we’re going to get together in a room and talk about what we’ve read and see what happens, that I can’t come up with learning objectives for each class meeting because the discussion may take us in directions I can’t predict. That makes sense to me too.

But a certain degree of structure is still crucial when we’re teaching courses for which we are evaluating others in ways that can affect their future, I think. I wouldn’t think it fair to walk into such a classroom and say to students that I don’t know what they’re going to be doing, exactly, or what the curriculum is going to be; all I know is I’m going to start with a couple of readings and questions and we’ll see what happens from there. That’s a fine and very interesting way to run an open online course–I love learning this way in courses like this, and thrive on seeing the unexpected things that happen! I’m not convinced it’s fair to students we are evaluating to do so.

Learning is uncertain, life is uncertain, but I feel strongly that I need to respect the imbalance of power between myself and my students and ensure that they have enough structure to be able to have at least a decent grasp on what the expectations are on which they will be evaluated. Maybe we will work on these expectations, perhaps a marking rubric for essays for example, collaboratively. Maybe we will work collaboratively on where we are going to go in the course, in a general sense. But regardless how we get there, I do think I want to try to direct the rhizome with some structure.

P.S. When I first heard about the notion of “rhizomatic learning,” it was in a presentation by Dave Cormier that included a discussion of how it is not necessarily a lens through which we should view all learning situations. I discuss that in a blog post from 2013, here (jump down to “when is rhizomatic learning appropriate?”). Part of the discussion there was that rhizomatic learning fits well in situations where there are not clear answers, but perhaps is not the way to go when one needs to learn certain basic facts before moving on to more complex domains where the answers aren’t clear. But so far in #rhizo15 I haven’t heard much or anything in the way of saying that maybe rhizomatic learning is good for some contexts but not all. I’m curious if people feel that it’s okay to not be rhizomatic in some contexts, or in some aspects of a course, or when learning certain sorts of things.

Foucault, the sovereign, discipline & bio-power

I gave a presentation last night for the Vancouver Institute for Social Research, a fantastic program that provides free lectures at an art gallery downtown for anyone to attend. This term’s series has focused on sovereignty, and I decided to give a talk on Foucault’s claim that in common ways of thinking about power in political theory (in the 1970s at least), we still have not yet cut off the head of the king:

What we need … is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the King’s head: in political theory that has still to be done (Interview, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon. Pantheon, 1980).

I contrasted the “juridico-discursive” view of power that, according to Foucault, has dominated political interpretations of power (and that is descended from the way monarchies came about and established themselves), with disciplinary power and bio-power.

The presentation was done through Prezi.com; here is a PDF of the presentation for this session.

Upcoming #TvsZ game and presentations at #et4online

#TvsZ is back! Running April 22-24, 2015. See the main website, here.

Plus, next week I and several other people are presenting on #TvsZ at the OLC “Emerging Technologies for Online Learning” 2015 conference.

What is #TvsZ?

That’s surprisingly difficult to answer. Here’s how I tried to describe it recently in an application for a teaching award, in which I discussed my work in open education.

Originally designed as a zombie game played on Twitter (and thus called “Twitter vs. Zombies”), we have also created a new version called “Technology vs. Zen.” Both games are played through Twitter, and are meant to bring people together in order to create collaborative stories. The other part of the purpose of the game is to help people learn how to use Twitter, and to give them motivation to create and share digital artifacts such as blog posts, images, videos, and more. The game usually happens over the course of a weekend, often lasting about three days.

Apocalypse, Flickr photo shared by Charles Hutchins, licensed CC BY 2.0

In “Twitter vs. Zombies” the overall setting of the game is a zombie apocalypse, where there are zombies who have started to infect humans. You can see the website for the third iteration of the zombie version, here: https://twittervszombies3.wordpress.com/basics/. On Twitter, one can be bitten by a zombie through the use of a hashtag, and then has a certain number of minutes to dodge or be rescued by someone else before they turn into a zombie themselves. But the game goes beyond this; the most interesting parts of the game are when people take on missions where they have to add to the ongoing story in the game through a blog post, a picture, a video, a drawing they take a picture of, a song, or many other things. These aspects of the game happen through new rule releases that occur about every 12 hours: https://twittervszombies3.wordpress.com/rules/

In “Technology vs. Zen” the setting is an apocalyptic scene of unknown origin; participants are to imagine that they have woken up to find a wasteland around them, dead and dying plants, deserted city streets. The game site for this version is here: http://tvsz.us. The point of the game is to figure out what has happened and to determine how to approach solving the problem. Players begin on one of two teams: “technology” or “nature,” each team devoted to either a technological solution or one that has to do with working more in tune with nature. Participants start out recruiting others for their teams, but then are asked to engage in missions such as finding food, building a shelter, describing what they think has happened, and determining an approach to solving the problem (examples of such missions can be found here: http://tvsz.us/story-2/).

A number of people have used #TvsZ in their courses, asking students to play in order to experience collaborative storytelling and connecting with people around the globe in a team that has to work together in order to accomplish their missions. They have also used it to show an example of open and emergent pedagogy, though outside of a specific course context. Finally, it serves as an engaging way to encourage students to learn how to create and post digital objects—though the game sites don’t have information on how to do so, participants learn this from each other (or from their instructor, if they are playing the game as part of a course). As the current TvsZ planning team wrote in an abstract for an upcoming conference presentation:

This game builds digital literacy through creating avenues for participants to engage in international collaboration, to compose for a visible and active audience, and to craft personal learning networks. It is a dynamic experience for engaging students in transmedia storytelling and narrative collaboration, and it can democratize the classroom by blurring the line between teacher and student. The game design itself is democratized through emergent rules: players re-shape the rules and revise the narrative as the game unfolds. (This quote comes from the abstract reprinted below)

But even since writing that, the game has changed again. This time we’re thinking of not having any teams to start with and asking people to create their own teams. Thus, there might not be a “technology” team or a “nature” team, but entirely different ones.

That’s one of the wonderful things about this game: it is continually evolving. And not only between games, but within the game itself: rules change over time, new missions are created for teams to complete, and participants are asked to suggest changes during the game as well. And actually, participants sometimes just change the game themselves by choosing to do something quite different than what we designed; in a recent version, which had a divide between humans and zombies, a group of people decided they didn’t want to be either humans or zombies and participate in biting or escaping bites, but to rather be neutral commentators who created poetry about the game.

What does one get out of playing the game? Here are a couple of blog posts I found with reflections on experiences in various versions: one by Karen Young, and one by Kevin Hodgson.

And here’s a fabulous artifact created out of what the teams did in #TvsZ 6.0, thanks to @nanalou022, which gives a good sense of what that version of the game was like.

So what are we doing at the conference?

I think I’ll just let our abstracts, which are pretty detailed, speak for themselves. We have two presentations, a longer one and a shorter one.

Here’s the abstract for the long, 2.5 hour workshop. This one is called Perforate Your Classroom: Collaboratively Hack the Open Online Game #TvsZ 6.0.” During this workshop, people will learn about the game, start playing it, learn how it has been used in courses, and work together on how they might change it for their own educational purposes.

All of the following is from this #et4online webpage.

Abstract

Participants will learn about and play the open online Twitter game #TvsZ, go through the process of hacking it, and discuss pedagogical benefits and challenges.

Extended Abstract

This workshop will invite participants to explore the pedagogical value of perforating oneÍs classroom: opening it up for students to learn with others online in loosely facilitated social media experiences. The seven international collaborating facilitators will share their experience of co-facilitating an open online game. The facilitators, who teach in Egypt, Canada, New York, Georgia, and California, will share their cross-institutional, cross-border experience of hacking #TvsZ and playing it with their students.

#TvsZ is an open online Twitter game played across an increasing variety of online sites and apps. The game, created originally in 2012 by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel, is usually played over 3-4 days by anyone who chooses to follow the Twitter hashtag #TvsZ, as well as students in participating classes. Players, who are often meeting virtually for the first time, interact with each other on Twitter via a basic game dynamic which encourages informal, spontaneous tweets relating to the game premise. As players develop increasing familiarity with other players and with the basic syntax of game tweets, additional game dynamics are introduced, often in response to player suggestions and initiatives. These additional dynamics encourage players to create a wide variety of media objects, to experiment with new modes of networked collaboration, and to refashion their roles in the game itself.

This game builds digital literacy through creating avenues for participants to engage in international collaboration, to compose for a visible and active audience, and to craft personal learning networks. It is a dynamic experience for engaging students in transmedia storytelling and narrative collaboration, and it can democratize the classroom by blurring the line between teacher and student. The game design itself is democratized through emergent rules: players re-shape the rules and revise the narrative as the game unfolds. Although #TvsZ had been played multiple times before, the diverse interests and backgrounds of the co-facilitators as well as the international flavor, led to an interest in hacking the game in order to meet the different needs of their students and their own diverse teaching agendas.

The basic structure of the game can be revised in numerous ways, however, and participants in the workshop will brainstorm how they might do so for their own teaching and learning contexts. For example, while most versions of #TvsZ started with a Zombie narrative of biting and converting human players, the 6.0 version was intentionally kept zombie-free and non-violent.

Our workshop will be experiential: one must play the game to get a good sense of how and why one might want to hack it. Workshop participants will play a short version of one of the #TvsZ games and brainstorm their own forks of the game, and discuss possible repercussions of various modifications to such a game. They will also discuss possible pedagogical benefits to including a game like #TvsZ in their curricula, as well as potential problems one might encounter when doing so (and how such problems might be addressed).

Workshop Interaction/Takeaways:
Participants will play a version of #TvsZ, go through the process of hacking it, and (time-permitting) try out aspects of their hacked version during the workshop. Participants will discuss pedagogical benefits of using such a game in their classes, possible challenges and approaches to assessing learning.

Presenter(s)

Pete Rorabaugh (Southern Polytechnic State University, USA)

Andrea Rehn (Whittier College, USA)

Christina Hendricks (University of British Columbia – Vancouver, Canada)

JR Dingwall (University of Alberta, Canada)

Maha Bali (American University in Cairo, Egypt)

Additional Authors

Janine DeBaise (SUNY-College of Environmental Science and Forestry, USA)

Lizzie Finnegan (D’Youville College, USA)

Here are the slides for that workshop:

Here’s our abstract for the shorter session. This one is called “Perforating the Classroom: How Hacking the Online Game #TvsZ 6.0 Brings Together Faculty, Students and Community Members.” It is just for talking about how we changed the original #TvsZ from a zombie narrative to a more generic apocalypse narrative, and why, and how we engaged in cross-world collaboration to do so.

The following is from this webpage for #et4online.

Abstract

Learn about the collaborative hacking and hosting of #TvsZ, an open online Twitter game which fosters digital literacies/network fluencies

Extended Abstract

#TvsZ is an open online Twitter game played across an increasing variety of online sites and apps. The game, created originally in 2012 by Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel, is usually played over 3-4 days by anyone who chooses to follow the Twitter hashtag #TvsZ, as well as students in participating classes. Players, who are often meeting virtually for the first time, interact with each other on Twitter via a basic game dynamic which encourages spontaneous tweets relating to the game premise. As players develop increasing familiarity with other players and with the basic syntax of game tweets, additional game dynamics are introduced, often in response to player suggestions and initiatives. These additional dynamics encourage players to create a wide variety of media objects, to experiment with new modes of networked collaboration, and to refashion their roles in the game itself.

The rationale for #TvsZ is simple; we call it the “perforated classroom” mode of teaching and learning. In this era of information abundance and fast-changing socio-economic paradigms, both students and teachers require new and different skills. Students need to learn to contextualize ideas through efficient web-enabled research practices, to share their results through effective multi-modal communication, to discover new resources and connect to emerging networks of experts as they prepare for lives which may require many transitions among fields. Teachers need to learn to model these these skills by interacting with students as curators of information and connected, public co-learners. The perforated classroom thus embodies these various methods of connection, while also enriching the possibilities of teacher-student, student-student, student-community, and student-teacher-community-global rapport beyond the classroom itself.

#TvsZ 6.0, played November 14-16, 2014, refashioned the premise and dynamics of play to respond to contemporary events, and to better adapt to the cultural and temporal distances among players and game facilitators. The global nature of the #TvsZ 6.0 facilitation team and their students resulted in some unique emergent dynamics during the game, which this presentation will highlight. While previous versions began with a Zombie infection narrative, the 6.0 version was intentionally kept zombie-free and non-violent.

#TvsZ 6.0 was hosted by a group of seven international collaborating scholars with varying types of expertise (and familiarity with the game itself) and with different institutional roles and teaching goals. We, and our students, live in three countries (Canada, Egypt and the US) and four widely separated time zones. While our students all speak English, many also use at least one other language as a primary mode of communication. Our students ranged from freshmen to seniors in college, and the participating classes focused on disciplines and topics. Two of the game hosts did not directly involve their own students, but facilitated the game out of a commitment to open learning itself. More than 150 players participated in the online game: some as students completing assigned work, some participating in extra credit activities, some who were invited to play to help them learn twitter literacy, some to learn about creative game design. In addition, many players from the Twitterverse (including veteran #TvsZ players from previous iterations) participated for the sheer fun of it.

This presentation will focus on #TvsZ 6.0’s cycle of collaborative development, focusing on the value of social networks for instructor collaboration, and sharing our experience of a cross-border, cross-institutional, and cross-cultural collaboration between teachers and students, from game host & student perspectives. By exploring a few of the media objects created by game participants, we will also discuss various methods for evaluating the outcomes of student, teacher, and community peer-learner collaborations. Each step of development and implementation exemplifies a stage in the digital fluency that the game promotes by involving people in the fun and frenzied creativity of participation, by inviting participants to collaborate and co-learn techniques of multimodal media creation, by tempting collaborators to become partners in the management of the game during gameplay, and by player-partners becoming hosts and hackers of future iterations of the game itself.

Open online games extend learning opportunities beyond the classroom, augmenting studentsÍ understanding of knowledge networks. The reflexive nature of #TvsZ and the other games it may spawn creates space to enjoy the game experience while critiquing its shortcomings (e.g., in terms of how language, pop culture, and even time zones affect players in different parts of the world). Students engage in collaborative, experiential, and self-directed learning, developing Twitter literacy about the values, as well as the potential risks, of using social media to network. They learn by doing; rather than following linear modules, they learn from how others are playing the game and they ask the community for help. They also learn about power dynamics in gaming and social media. Hacking the game into a more collaborative narrative, and playing it with students from different countries and cultures provided insights not previously visible in #TvsZ iterations, such as how game rules (in terms of time limits and timezones) could affect equity in the game, how cultural attitudes could affect students’ gameplay, and how to develop game dynamics that would encourage students to venture outside the safety of their classmates and play with strangers online.

Presenter(s)

Andrea Rehn (Whittier College, USA)

@profrehn

Maha Bali (American University in Cairo, Egypt)

@bali_maha

Pete Rorabaugh (Southern Polytechnic State University, USA)

@allisttelling

JR Dingwall (University of Alberta, Canada)

@JRDingwall

Christina Hendricks (University of British Columbia – Vancouver, Canada)

@clhendricksbc

Additional Authors

Lizzie Finnegan (D’Youville College, USA)

Janine DeBaise (SUNY-College of Environmental Science; Forestry, USA)

Sherif Osman (American University in Cairo, Egypt)

Here are the slides for that shorter workshop:

What is open education?

Wordle of this blog post, from http://www.wordle.net

I wrote the following narrative for a teaching award application, and someone has requested that I post it openly as well, as it may be useful to others. I’m happy to do so! (Update July 18, 2015: unfortunately, I didn’t get the award, but you can see my entire application for it in this post).

This was a section of the application where I describe the basics about what open education is. I then go on, after this, to talk about how I engage in open educational activities in my own work. I might post those sections here later, in separate posts.

If you want to learn more about open education, there is also a great ebook called The Open Education Handbook. David Wiley has created an open course on open education, here: https://learn.canvas.net/courses/4

And here is the open education course at the Open University in the UK that I took in 2013. My blog posts from that course are here.

What is open education?

Financial, legal, technological openness: open educational resources

What is open education? To start, it is useful to consider the various meanings the word “open” can have in “open education.” Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) give a useful overview of some of these meanings, including what they call “financial openness,” “legal openness,” “technological openness, and “social openness.”

A common understanding of “open” is “free,” as in free of cost, or what Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) call “financial openness.” This is the meaning one might immediately think of as associated with Massive, Open, Online Courses. These are courses that are available for anyone with a reliable internet connection to take, free of cost.[1] Financial openness is also exemplified when a teacher makes a set of lecture notes, essay topics, a video, an image, etc. available for others to use without a fee.

“Legal openness” refers to the degree to which teaching materials, student work, research and more are licensed to allow others to reuse, revise, and redistribute. Some MOOCs, for example, may only allow you to view materials, not download them to revise or share them with others.[2] The “Open Definition” by the Open Knowledge Foundation addresses this meaning of open directly: “Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness)” (Open Knowledge Foundation, n.d.). David Wiley, in a widely-used definition of “open content,” lists similar requirements for openness, and labels them the “five R’s”:

Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend) (Wiley, n.d.)

Wiley argues that the more of these five activities that are allowed, the more “open” a work or set of materials is. How one alerts others to the possibility that they can use one’s work in such ways is through an open license, such as a Creative Commons license. [3] Giving one’s work an open license means that one retains copyright, but allows others to use, share, and sometimes also revise the work without asking permission each time.

Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) also discuss “technological openness,” which refers to the use of different sorts of software tools. Those that are open source are more open technologically than those that are not. In addition, tools that allow for easy editing by anyone, without having to purchase the software, are more open: thus, documents in Open Office or Google Documents are considered more open than those in Microsoft Word. Both David Wiley and “The Open Definition” also acknowledge the importance of technological openness: if a work can only be edited using tools that are very expensive, or that only run on certain platforms, or that require a high level of expertise, it is less open.

Open education is often discussed in terms of using or creating “open educational resources,” or OER—these combine financial, legal, and technological openness. According to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,

OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, n.d.).

Thus, syllabi, lecture notes, video recordings of lectures, slides, animations, assignments, podcasts, and more can be OER, so long as they are given an open license. Engaging in open education can be as simple as assigning one or more OER for students to read, hear, watch in one’s classes, or creating OER for others to use, revise and share themselves.

Social openness: open pedagogy and students as producers

Finally, Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) discuss “social openness”: “the willingness to make materials available beyond the confines of the classroom by lecturers, students and university management” (p. 105). Social openness not only involves making teaching materials available to a wider audience, but also engaging in more collaborative activities among students, between students and instructors, and between both and the wider community. Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) point to a range between (1) lecturer-centred openness, in which, for example, an instructor creates all curriculum materials and shares them openly, to (2) more student-centred openness, involving students contributing to the curriculum through adding content in things such as blogs and wikis, to (3) inviting contributions and collaborations between students, instructors, and members of the public—such as through connecting with professionals in the field (p. 105).

Similarly, the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, drafted in 2007 and currently signed by nearly 2500 individuals and over 250 organizations, focuses on creation and use of OER; but it also emphasizes changing one’s pedagogy to invite more collaboration between instructors, students and the public:

We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go (“Cape Town Open Education Declaration,” 2007).

Such collaborative pedagogical approaches are sometimes referred to as “open pedagogy.” Wiley (2013) defines open pedagogy as educational activities that are only possible because materials are made available with an open license. Examples he gives include: asking students to revise and remix OER that are used in a course in order to create tutorials for aspects of the course that students often struggle with, and asking students to create or edit Wikipedia entries on topics discussed in a course. Similarly, though using a different term, Ehlers (2011) labels such activities “open educational practices”: “practices which support the (re)use and production of OER through institutional policies, promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path” (p. 4). Open educational practices, like Wiley’s view of open education, involve the use and creation of OER in courses where learners are collaborators and co-producers of the curriculum. Thus, “[t]he pure usage of … open educational resources in a traditional closed and top-down, instructive, exam-focused learning environment is not open educational practice,” according to Ehlers (2011, p. 5), but doing so in the context of a course where students revise such materials and act as collaborators and co-producers of curriculum is.

Tom Woodward expands on this view of open pedagogy to refer to “a general philosophy of openness (and connection) in all elements of the pedagogical process,” where “[o]pen is a purposeful path towards connection and community” (Grush, 2013; italics in original). Thus, open pedagogy can also include open assignments, which allow students to shape how they will show evidence of learning (or even create assignments for other students to do); open course planning, in which one invites comments and contributions from others when planning a course; and what Woodward calls “open products,” where students publish their work “for an audience greater than their instructor. … Their work, being open, has the potential to be used for something larger than the course itself and to be part of a larger global conversation” (Grush, 2013).

Asking students to create open products, to do work openly and publicly and thereby contribute to knowledge production both inside and beyond the course, is also part of a pedagogical model that Neary and Winn (2009) call “the student as producer.” Contrasting with the idea of the student as a “consumer” of knowledge transmitted by an expert, and higher education as guided by market forces for the sake of students’ future employability, the student as producer model can be defined briefly as: “undergraduate students working collaboratively with academics to create work of social importance that is full of academic content and value, while at the same time reinvigorating the university beyond the logic of market economics” (Neary and Winn, 2009, p. 193). The student as producer approach “aims to radically democratize the process of knowledge production” (Neary and Winn, 2009, p. 201). Bruff (2013), citing Bass and Elmendorf (n.d.), emphasizes openness in the student as producer model, by arguing for the importance of students sharing their work with “authentic audiences,” people beyond just the instructor who can benefit from what they are producing. In addition, Bruff (2013) lists two other elements of his view of the student as producer model: students work on open-ended questions or problems, ones that don’t yet have a solution (rather than only working to get the “right” solution to a problem), and students have some autonomy in choosing and carrying out projects.

I am here linking the student as producer model with open pedagogy as discussed above, because I think there is significant overlap; I refer to all of these here as “open pedagogy.” Examples of open pedagogy include activities from asking students to make public blog posts (or posts that are at least shared with the rest of the class, even if they are not public), having students create websites or wikis that showcase a research project they have completed, encouraging students to revise OER and re-share them for other students, teachers and the public, to opening one’s classroom activities to participation by those not officially registered in the course (such as by having discussions on social media, opening up presentations by doing them on webinars, and more).

In my work in open education, I have used, created and shared open educational resources, and I have also engaged in various activities I am putting under the general label of open pedagogy.

[In the rest of the application I discuss my open educational activities…]

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[1] Many MOOCs currently are offered through central organizations such as EdX (https://www.edx.org/), Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/), Future Learn (https://www.futurelearn.com/), Iversity (https://iversity.org/), and UnX (courses offered in Spanish and Portuguese) (http://www.redunx.org/web/aprende/cursos). But there are also institutions of higher education that offer their own MOOCs on their own platforms, without connecting to one of these kinds of organizations.

[2] For example, the Coursera terms of use say: “You may download material from the Sites only for your own personal, non-commercial use. You may not otherwise copy, reproduce, retransmit, distribute, publish, commercially exploit or otherwise transfer any material, nor may you modify or create derivatives works of the material.” (Coursera, 2014).

[3] Creative Commons licenses provide a range of choices depending on how one wants to share one’s work (e.g., one can restrict the work to non-commercial uses, one can insist that any new works made from the original be shared also with an open license, or one can allow others to reuse the work but not allow any revisions). Finally, Creative Commons has a public domain license by which one can signal that they are releasing their work into the public domain, free to use, revise, redistribute without restriction on how and for what purpose, and without the requirement that the original creator be attributed. See Creative Commons, “About the licenses” for more: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/.

Works Cited

Bass, R. and Elmendorf, H. (n.d.). Social pedagogies: Teagle Foundation white paper. Retrieved from https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/bassr/social-pedagogies/

Bruff, D. (2013, September 3). Students as Producers: An Introduction [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/2013/09/students-as-producers-an-introduction/

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration. (2007). Read the Declaration. Retrieved from http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration

Coursera. (2014). Terms of Use. Retrieved from https://www.coursera.org/about/terms

Ehlers, U.-D. (2011). Extending the Territory: From Open Educational Resources to Open Educational Practices. Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, 15(2), 1–10.

Grush, M. (2013, November 12). Open Pedagogy: Connection, Community, and Transparency–A Q&A with Tom Woodward. Retrieved February 15, 2015, from http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/11/12/open-pedagogy-connection-community-and-transparency.aspx

Hodgkinson-Williams, C., & Gray, E. (2009). Degrees of openness: The emergence of Open Educational Resources at the University of Cape Town. International Journal of Education and Development Using Information and Communication Technology, 5(5), 101–116. Retrieved from http://ijedict.dec.uwi.edu/viewarticle.php?id=864

Neary, M., & Winn, J. (2009). The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education. In The Future of Higher Education: Policy, Pedagogy and the Student Experience (pp. 192–210). London, UK: Continuum International Publishing Group. Retrieved from http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/1675/

Open Knowledge Foundation. (n.d.). The Open Definition. Retrieved from http://opendefinition.org/od/

Wiley, D. (n.d.). The open content definition. Retrieved from http://opencontent.org/definition/

Wiley, D. (2013, October 21). What is Open Pedagogy? [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (n.d.). Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education/open-educational-resources

Rubrics and peer feedback

I’ve been participating in an open, online course called Human MOOC: Humanizing Online Instruction. It’s officially over now, but I’m just completing a couple of final things from it.

One of the sections was on peer review/peer feedback by students of each others’ work. There was a link to a very helpful resource on peer feedback from the teaching and learning centre at Washington University in St. Louis. This page, linked to the previous one, is also very useful: “How to Plan and Guide In-class Peer Review Sessions.” A couple of things struck me about these resources that I wanted to comment on briefly.

What rubric/criteria should students use to do peer review?

On the first resource linked above, the following is stated:

Some instructors ask their students to evaluate their peers’ writing using the same criteria the instructor uses when grading papers (e.g., quality of thesis, adequacy of support, coherence, etc.). Undergraduate students often have an inadequate understanding of these criteria, and as a result, they either ignore or inappropriately apply such criteria during peer-review sessions (Nilson 2003).

The second resource states similarly:

The role of the peer-reviewer should be that of a reader, not an evaluator or grader. Do not replicate the grading criteria when designing these worksheets. Your students will not necessarily be qualified to apply these criteria effectively, and they may feel uncomfortable if they are given the responsibility to pronounce an overall judgment on their peers’ work.

This makes sense, though at the same time it’s troubling because if the students can’t understand the rubrics we use to mark their work, then how can they understand why they got the mark they did, or what they need to do to improve? It seems to me the answer here is not to ask students to use a different rubric when doing peer review than what we use to mark, but changing the rubric we use to mark so that it makes more sense to students (if there are comprehension problems). Now, I haven’t read the work by Nilson cited above, but it would be interesting to look more carefully into what undergraduate students tend to understand or not understand, or why, and then change one’s rubric accordingly.

One way one might do this, perhaps, is to ask them to use one’s marking rubric to evaluate sample essays and then invite feedback on the rubric as/after they are doing this. Then one can maybe catch some of the things students don’t understand before one uses the rubric for marking the essays?

Mock peer review session

The second resource suggests that one holds a mock session to begin with, which seems an excellent idea. It connects with the importance of training students in peer review before asking them to engage in it on work for the course (as discussed in Sluijsmans et al., 2002).

The idea would be to give them a “fake” essay of a kind similar to what they need to write, give them the peer review worksheet, and ask them to come up with comments on the paper. This can be done individually or in groups. Then, in class, have students give their comments to the whole group and the instructor writes them down on something that can be shown on the screen (or, alternatively, one could have them write the comments on a shared document online so they could be projected easily and the instructor doesn’t have to re-write them!). Then the class can have a discussion on the essay, the comments, and the marking worksheet/rubric, to clear up any confusion or help students improve their comments–e.g., moving from “good introduction” to saying what about the introduction is good, in particular.

This is an excellent idea, and I’m going to incorporate it in my upcoming philosophy class this summer. In Arts One we meet every week to do peer review of essays, in groups of four students plus the prof, so we can help students learn how to do peer review well on an almost one-to-one basis. And, since they do it every week for a year, they get quite good at it after awhile, even a very short time, actually!

Self-assessment

I could have sworn that the resources linked above from Washington University also talked about the value of students doing self-assessment of their own work, but now I can’t find that on those pages. But I was thinking that after they do peer feedback on each others’ work, it would be useful for them to go back to their own work and give feedback on it. It seems to me that after reading and commenting on others’ work, seeing what works/what doesn’t work, one could come to one’s own with fresh eyes, having learned from others’ work and also having distanced oneself from one’s own a bit.

I think I’ll try asking students to submit the peer review worksheet on their own essays after doing the peer feedback on others’, when they turn in their drafts post-peer-feedback.

Works cited

Nilson, Linda. (2003). “Improving Student Peer Feedback.” College Teaching, 51 (1), p. 34-38.

Sluijsmans, D. M. A., Brand-Gruwel, S., van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Bastiaens, T. J. (2002). The training of peer assessment skills to promote the development of reflection skills in teacher education. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 29(1), 23–42. http://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-491X(03)90003-4

Watchmen Part Two

Well, I didn’t get around to writing this second post on Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen (for Arts One) as quickly as I’d have liked. That’s a four-day holiday weekend for you, I guess. But I did still want to write out my thoughts on something about this text, in order to clarify them for myself if nothing else.

Here is a link to the first post I wrote on Watchmen, a few days ago.

In this post I want to think through the treatment of women in the text.

Sexual violence

Apparently a number of people have criticized Alan Moore for having so many scenes of rape, or discussion of rapes that have happened in the past, in his comics. He replies to these concerns in a very long interview (scroll down to the “sexual violence against women” section). I’m not so much worried about having an attempted rape scene in this book as I am about how the characters react.

Sally Jupiter, who suffered an attempted rape at the hands of the Comedian, apparently blames herself, at least in part, for the rape. In an interview published at the end of issue 9, she says:

You know, rape is rape and there’s no excuses for it, absolutely none, but for me, I felt … I felt like I’d contributed in some way. … I really felt that, that I was somehow as much to blame for … for letting myself be his victim not in a physical sense, but … but, it’s like what if, y’know? What if, just for a moment, maybe I really did want ….

And this is just after we’ve discovered that Sally went back to the Comedian, slept with him, and had her daughter Laurie as a result.

One could try to argue, well, this could be read just as a potentially accurate portrayal of how some women feel after they’ve been raped, that maybe it was their fault somehow. And it’s true that women do sometimes feel that way. But this feeling of Sally’s is not questioned in any clear sense, not problematized. In fact, it’s supported by the fact that she went back to the guy and had sex with him later. Worse, in the last scene we see of Sally she has kissed the picture of the Comedian in tears.

Now, this doesn’t show that the text suggests the attempted rape was okay, but it does suggest that perhaps he was more right than he realized when he forced her, thinking she wanted it too. It not only blames the victim to some extent, it could appear to reduce the evil of what he did because, after all, her “no” did kind of mean “yes.” In an era in which sexual violence against women is still alarmingly high, I think this is a very bad thing to portray without problematizing it.

[But after writing the rest of this post, now I’m wondering if maybe it IS problematized? See last section of the post, below.]

Sure, this was published in the mid-80s, and maybe that should make a difference in the degree to which we blame the author, but nevertheless, I find it very disturbing regardless of whether he/they should have known better at the time. That doesn’t mean we can’t still criticize it now.

Women and sex

I also got the sense that pretty much every woman who is a prominent character in the text is somehow connected to sex.

From Pixabay.com, licensed CC0.

There is all that above about Sally Jupiter
Laurie is the one who initiates sex with Dan Dreiburg at first.
Malcolm’s wife Gloria complains that he works when she wants to have sex (6.13), and when she leaves him she subjects him to “crude sexual insults” (6.28).
Josephine (Joey) talks about just wanting to sleep with Aline towards the end (11.9).
Rorschach’s mother was a sex worker (as is his landlady).
Janey wasn’t too terribly connected with sex in the text, only being shown having sex with Jon once.

The only major-ish female characters I could think of who were not connected to sex were in the pirate comic-within-a-comic (the narrator’s wife, and the woman he kills and puts on a horse to ride with her into town).

It just struck me that there are a good number of men in the text who are portrayed doing many things, none of them being sex, but few women. E.g., Bernard & Bernie, Rorschach, Veidt, Hollis Mason, Malcolm…. It feels like when there is a woman in the text who has a major role, she must be shown having sex, or wanting to have sex, or being subjected to sexual violence. But that men can do other things.

One good thing, at least

I do like how Laurie complains about her costume off and on, and at the end says that she needs something that protects her, maybe with a mask, and that she ought to carry a gun (12.30). She, at least, doesn’t buy into the idea that female costumed heroes should be wearing skimpy clothes and be treated as sexual objects. This is in contrast to her mother, who likes it that she is portrayed in a sexually objectifying way in a “Tijuana Bible” (2.4).

Now that I think about it, though, perhaps we can take this fact about the difference between Sally and Laurie as a critique of Sally in the text. Laurie realizes how degrading the images of her mother are, but her mother finds them flattering. Laurie is angry about what the Comedian did to her mother, while her mother can’t sustain her anger (interview published at the end of chapter 9; 12.29).

Perhaps the text is portraying Sally’s attitudes towards and actions after the attempted rape as problematic, whereas Laurie’s attitude is better? Hmmmm…. Now I’ve written myself into not being sure of my own earlier views. That’s one of the powers of writing!

Hello TWP15!

I’m part of a team designing and facilitating an open online course called “Teaching with Word Press,” which will be held in June 2015. You can see our developing site, complete with what we’ve come up with so far for modules, here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/teachwordpress/

And our twitter hashtag is #TWP15 (thus the title of this post!).

It’s still very much a work in progress, and we welcome comments, suggestions–just make comments on the pages/posts! Specifically, we’d love to have comments on our draft syllabus (and maybe we should call it something else, like “schedule”). You can comment on each of the three modules linked there as well.

A little about me and Word Press

I’ve been using Word Press for many years for this blog, but only recently started using it for my courses. Right now I manage sites for my on-campus courses, including the following:

Philosophy 102, Introduction to Philosophy (soon to be updated for Summer 2015)

Philosophy 230, Introduction to Moral Theory (last taught Fall 2014)

Philosophy 449, Continental Philosophy (last taught Spring 2014)

Arts One seminar (a group of 20 students)

Arts One Open (a site where we publish video recordings of lectures, podcasts, blog posts by students and profs, and more)

On the Arts One sites, students and professors make blog posts on their own blog sites and we aggregate them to the main site. On the Philosophy course sites, I’ve just asked students to do posts on the main course site, rather than creating their own blogs (mostly because Arts One is a year-long course, so it makes more sense to ask them to o through the work of creating their own site!).

For all of the sites, I post most of my course materials publicly on the site, and the sites have a general site-wide license (excepting student posts) of CC BY.

On my Arts One seminar site, I’ve been working with some developers here at UBC to create a system where students can submit essays through Gravity Forms, and have those essays only be accessible to me and the members of their small groups. The small group members can then comment on the essays on the site.

What I’d like to learn how to do

I really want to start incorporating online quizzes, or comprehension checks–whether for marks or just for formative purposes. I have worked with Gravity Forms only a little bit, and would like to learn more.

Some people at UBC have been experimenting with Learning Wrappers around videos, such as can be seen on the UBC Digital Tatoo site, here. Below the video on that link, there are sections for “think,” “explore,” and “discuss,” which take you to places where you can answer questions, find more resources, and engage in discussion. That site is run on Word Press too, so this sort of thing is possible!

I’d also like to learn how to optimize the organization of materials on my sites. I think I could improve that, and I’d love to hear from participants how to do so.

One of my favourite things about facilitating courses like this is actually participating alongside others, and learning from them. I’m looking forward to that!

Watchmen Part One

Our final text of the year in Arts One is Moore and Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen. We only had one seminar meeting on this text this week, as opposed to our usual two. Which means I didn’t spend as much time going over the text, deciding on my own interpretations, as usual: usually I spend at least 3 hours before each seminar, and this week I spent just 3 hours before one seminar rather than two. I wanted to spend some time in this blog post going through my thoughts on a few things–writing them out is really the only way they get clear for me.

This first post is starts off talking about Rorschach, then moves into broader themes related to black/white, dark/light and. I also wanted to write about my concerns regarding the novels portrayal of women (which really bothered me), but I’ll save that for the next post (hopefully tomorrow) b/c there is a lot to discuss here already.

Rorschach Blot 1 from Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Why do I dislike Rorschach?

A number of people disagreed on whether they liked this character. Some of us (myself included) find him to be highly questionable as a person, and others sympathized with him because of his bad childhood, or thought he was at least somewhat likeable in other ways. Why don’t I like Rorschach? I’m trying to figure that out.

One obvious thing, for me, is that he reads and trusts the New Frontiersman. This paper publishes racist things, like saying the Ku Klux Klan may have had “later excesses” but “originally came into being because decent people had perfectly reasonable fears for the safety of their persons and belonging when forced into proximity with people from a culture far less morally advanced.” And then again: the Klan worked “to preserve American culture in areas where there were very real dangers of that culture being overrun and mongrelized” (end of Chpt. 8). Now I just don’t see any way to read these statements that isn’t racist. And I don’t believe that as readers the point is for us to take this paper seriously or sympathize with it. Since Rorschach does read this paper, and thinks they’re the only ones he can trust, that tarnishes him for me.

I suppose one might say that well, if anyone is going to print his story it’s going to be a paper that doesn’t mind printing things that sound crazy or controversial in the name of what it thinks of as truth. But he does read the paper himself, going to the news agent Bernard to get it most days.

He also says a couple of things in the first issue that are offensive. After visiting Heidt he asks: “Possibly homosexual? Must remember to investigate further” (1.19). As if being homosexual is something that he needs to investigate, as if there is something about it that requires his further attention rather than just being, well, a fact like someone being heterosexual. Next, as Laurie rightly notices, he refers to the Comedian’s attempted rape of Sally as one of the “moral lapses of men who died in their country’s service” (1.21). Laurie correctly gets upset about this seeming trivialization of her mother’s attempted rape.

These, I think, are the main reasons why I really can’t bring myself to like him. Yes, there’s also the violence he engages in, but arguably that’s against people who have done very bad things: the guy who kidnapped and murdered a child, the guys who came to his prison cell to murder him; wasn’t the man he killed to protest the Keene act a serial rapist? I can’t find that right now, but that’s interesting, in contrast to what he said about the Comedian. It’s not so much the violence that bugs me as the stuff above.

Black and white

At first I wondered whether the book was asking us to see Rorschach somewhat sympathetically b/c of his integrity, the strength of his convictions. There is something valuable in his idea that it’s wrong to let Veidt get away with what he has done, to not tell anyone. In issue 12, p. 23, he tells Jon that he can’t go along with keeping silent, because “Evil must be punished. People must be told.” Veidt can’t get away without being punished. There is some truth to this–he’s done something awful, and it is wrong to let him get away with it. But there’s also truth to the other side, that if they say something it’s likely to destroy a possible peace that millions of people have died to achieve.

As I said in class today, I feel like there’s a kind of dual extreme between Veidt and Rorschach: Veidt (and Dr. Manhattan agrees) says that the moral choice is clear–they must say nothing. Rorschach, too, thinks the moral choice is clear–evil must be punished. I think the moral choice isn’t clear here, that it’s not that black and white, to refer to Rorschach’s face and worldview. It’s a tough choice, and as Dan asks, how can humans make the decision? Perhaps, insofar as Veidt, Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach can make the decision, they are inhuman? But then again, Dan does make the decision to agree with keeping quiet, even though he at least struggles with it.

Rorschach’s face is made of fabric that is, in his words, “[b]lack and white moving, changing shape … but not mixing. No gray. Very, very beautiful” (6.10). Veidt refers back to this when he describes Rorschach as “a man of great integrity, but [who] seems to see the world in very black and white, Manichean terms,” and Veidt sees that as “an intellectual limitation” (last page of issue 11). This would speak against my statement above of Veidt seeming to be very sure of himself, somewhat black and white himself, but I think he is sure of himself as having decided that things are not either good or evil, but evil can be used in the service of good. And, as noted in class today, Rorschach refuses to “compromise”: “Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise” (12.20; see also 10.22).

This black and white stance, this inability to compromise, reminds me of course of Miller’s The Crucible, where he criticizes (in his notes) the Manichean worldview of “us” vs “them,” where “we” are the good, the Godly, and anyone who is against us is diabolical. When then leads me to think also of the cold war, and both sides being unwilling to compromise, to back down for fear the other would take advantage of this. And I don’t think this is portrayed in the novel as a positive thing! When two groups or two people are both so certain they are right and refuse to move towards the other in any way, we are going to end up in conflict rather than, as we discussed in class today, coming together, uniting, connecting (which seems to be one of the things valued in the text).

Darkness and light

Lisbon Sunset in Black and White, Flickr photo shared by Pedro Ribeiro Simões, licensed CC BY 2.0

Finally, I want to think a little about the black and white images in the text. There is one panel that’s entirely black, and another that’s entirely white. The entirely black one is at the end of issue 6. Malcolm is looking at a Rorschach blot, thinking about why people argue, like he and his wife, when “Life’s so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing” (6.28). He begins to muse about the meaninglessness of life, the “real horror” of life (echoes of Heart of Darkness?). Looking into the Rorschach blot, he tries to find meaning there, but can’t: “The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else” (6.28). And the next panel is merely blackness, as the ‘camera’ zooms in on the blackness of the Rorschach blot, followed by a quote from Nietzsche: “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you” (6.28).

I haven’t looked into this quote from Nietzsche much, but one possible interpretation of “the abyss” that fits with its use here is the utter lack of meaning, the emptiness of the universe in the sense that we just don’t matter; it will go on with or without us, uncaring. There is no meaning to life, no morality but what we impose on it. Rorschach says something similar in 6.26: “Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose.” And he imposes a stark, black-and-white morality on what is, at root, just empty blackness.

The all-white panel is at the end of issue 11 (11.28) when the creature Veidt has sent to New York arrives and kills millions of people. Bernie and Bernard are split apart into fragments the same way that Jon is before he becomes Dr. Manhattan. On 4.8, where he is depicted being pulled apart into fragments, he says, “the light is taking me to pieces.” The same thing is happening on 11.28, where the characters’ faces are lit up before they are taken to pieces and all that’s left is light in the last panel.

This light and the fragmentation that results is of course reminiscent of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the “shadows” of people that were sometimes left on the walls are like the black images of Jon and then Bernie and Bernard left in the panels on 4.8 and 11.28. On 6.16, Malcolm points out the link between the silhouettes painted on the street walls and the atomic shadows. While the black darkness of meaninglessness is a horror, so is the blinding white light that tears us into pieces.

Veidt talks about ushering in “an age of illumination so dazzling that humanity will reject the darkness in its heart” (12.17) (again, echoes of Heart of Darkness). He is associated with ‘light’ in the sense of enlightenment, knowledge, but also with the light in the television screens he is continually watching. I’m not sure what to make of this, exactly, except it seems that the kind of light he brings, the “dazzling illumination,” is more like the cold, calculating rationality of someone who sees things only in the big picture, who weighs the lives lost to the lives saved as if they are mere numbers. It is like, I think, the inhuman perspective of Dr. Manhattan, whose view-from-all-time makes him think of human life as invaluable and unnecessary. He does, that is, until he sees individuals as improbable “miracles” (9.27)–until he begins to see the value of specific individuals, of their particularity coming from chaos as being miraculous. Veidt doesn’t care about individuals, only the abstract concepts of “humanity” and “peace” vs “war.”

Well, I think that’s quite enough musing for the moment. I’m not sure I’ve made anything any clearer for anyone else, but I do think I’m a bit clearer on some of my own views of these characters and this story.