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We’re very interested in the outcomes that happen when you don’t know the outcomes that might happen.

What happens if you leave your community open and invite the whole world in? In other words, when a community gets together and is talking about things, it not only defines the original problem or goal, but the goal itself might change dramatically over the course of the project. We wanted to allow for the free flow of thinking that may or may not end up solving “a problem.”

This is that model of “collaboration by difference.” We might not have anything in common except what we know to be the case about our one contribution to something. But collaboratively and collectively we can yield something more interesting at the end. But all those things have to be thought through together.

To me it’s one of the tragedies of the so-called information age. Here we have this astonishing new way that people are making knowledge together. As educators we should all be vibrating with happiness at this moment! Here are millions of people, typically unpaid, with no ulterior motive, for profit or otherwise, who are validating what we do as a profession with what they do in the spare time as a passion. That seems to suggest that all of us overworked underpaid teachers have it right, that in fact there is something about humanity that likes to learn, and likes to share its learning, and likes to participate. That’s incredible!

Additional concepts decentered by Web 2.0 epistemologies include authorship, publication, refereeing, collaboration, participation, customizing, interdisciplinarity, credentialing, expertise, norms, training, mastery, hierarchy, taxonomy, professionalism, rigor, excellence, standards, and status.²

Where in particular do you see resistance in the humanities around the idea of participatory learning? 

I think it butts up against a number of issues. One is hierarchy and credentialing. If we’re going to be thinking about participatory or social learning, what does that do to the idea of expertise? I personally don’t think it really undermines it it, but many of the formal ways that we evaluate good work--mainly peer review--will undergo a significant transformation, at least expansion. As I said in the piece in PMLA,

The very concept of peer review needs to be defined and interrogated. We use the term as if it were self-explanatory and unitary, and yet who does and does not count as a peer is complex and part of a subtle and often self-constituting (and circular) system of accrediting and credentialing (i.e., “good schools” decide what constitutes a “good school”). We peer-review in different modes in different circumstances. (I’ve known some kind teachers to be savage conference respondents--and vice versa.) Humanities 2.0 peer review extends and makes public the various ways in which we act as professionals judging one another and contributing to one another’s work, whether subtly or substantively.³

I think that students are fabulous at participatory learning outside the classroom. When they are in the classroom, at any institution of higher learning, they have succeeded their entire life by excelling in a hierarchical model of learning

To switch to the flickr “this photo sucks” kind of learning in an educational setting where--at least metaphorically--you’re used to sitting in rows, looking straight ahead to the teacher, handing in your work on time, getting your A from the teacher, doing what’s necessary to get that A, passing your PSATs, passing your SATs with flying colors, taking after-school cram school in order to do better on your SATs: after a lifetime of such preparation, it’s really hard to switch modes. I mean, we’ve been training kids from infancy. 

We know that even two-year-olds recognize when they are in “teaching situations.” Infant developmental studies show that when you address toddlers in teaching mode, they sit straighter, their pupils dilate, they turn their heads less. By the time they are 18, they think education is this posture of attention to superiors who have knowledge to impart to them--the whole hierarchy.