Are we becoming a guild? Should we be?
Posted 22nd April, 2010 by dave.cormier
This is a quick introduction to the idea of the 'guild' in education from my rhizomatic stuff. (more here http://davecormier.com/edblog/2010/01/27/community-as-curriculum-vol-2-t... )
Are we a guild?
The Guild Narrative
View more presentations from coarsesalt.
5 comments so far:
Gordon Otto says: Profession minus Guild = Fiduciary
As a parent who is a lawyer, one of my primary questions regarding K-12 schooling has been where, as a profession, is the fiduciary duty of trust to others who place their trust in that profession (either voluntarily, by monopoly legislation, or by invitation of the professional)?
Among the adults at work in schooling (be they government, trustee, administration, teacher, parent...) there seems to be no fiduciary duties imposed one to the other... duties as professionals that are paramount to duties to employer, duties to colleagues or duties to self. Other professions, in their self-government, accept those duties (and succeed more or less well, time to time, in meeting them).
Fiduciaries, in any conflict of interest situation (and education is a steel-wool bundle of conflicts of interest), are duty-bound to place their interests aside when they may conflict with any other interests of those whose trust has been placed in them. And if they are unwilling to make that sacrifice, they must decline the trust from the start. I don't see that happening, as a rule, in the world of K-12 schooling.
Look at the definition of "professional" in the writings of those championing "professional learning communities" and you find it basically defined as "being paid to do it". As distinct from "amateurs", who, by derivation of that word, do "it" for love. But profession in society has grown, I believe, to include also the notion of fiduciary, and the notion of setting aside self-interest when trust is invited. I don't see that entrenched in the guild of schooling.
I think entrenching fiduciary duties adult-to-adult at work in schooling will secure its professional standing into the future. Declining those duties will secure its guild standing.
GLO
www.parentsnschools.com
Keith Hamon says: Rhizomatic Guilds?
I like hearkening back to a more organic mode of social organization, but I'm not sure the guild goes back far enough. I'd like to go back to early village tribes. To my mind, guilds were another type of hierarchical organization created to overcome the limitations of Dunbar's Number, the concept of British sociologist Robin Dunbar that we humans are limited to about 150 stable social relationships at a time. Hierarchies were about the only kind of organizational technology that humans had until the emergence of electronic communication networks, especially the Internet. This new technology allows us to build rhizomatic social structures of tribal villages that can extend far beyond Dunbar's limit of 150 stable connections—1,000 Facebook friends, for instance.
While a guild may ratchet back some of the egregious rigidity of modern hierarchical structures, I don't know why we should keep any of that rigidity. In the post Community as Curriculum – vol 2. The Guild/Distributed Continuum to Dave's Educational Blog, Dave Cormier notes the validation of work as one of the benefits of a guild:
[Guilds] do offer a number of very significant advantages—perhaps the most important being quality control. … The exclusive right of the guilds to sell certain goods in certain markets, coupled with quality standards written into the guild regulations, assured buyers that all goods under the guild’s jurisdiction would be of a certain quality. The guild “imprimatur,” in other words, took the place of the reputation of individual craftsman as a quality assurance device. (Merges, 2004, p. 7)
What bothers me about this benefit of guilds is the exclusive right of the guilds to sell certain goods in certain markets, which to my mind too quickly degenerates into an exercise of power typical of almost all command-and-control hierarchical structures. I much prefer the policing of quality afforded by new technologies. For instance, the Amazon or eBay ranking capabilities that allow 1,941 people out of 2,000 (97%) to positively rate this product or transaction. The first action seems an exercise of power, while the second seems an exercise of force. I think we can develop technologies that will extend this ranking/validating capability into fields beyond commerce.
Of course, it's easy to prefer this sort of crowd-sourced evaluation if I'm shopping for a book, and much more difficult if I'm shopping for a teacher or a surgeon, but even with these examples, I'm not so sure that we wouldn't benefit from a heavy dose of open, transparent, crowd-sourced evaluations. I think I could make a better choice in physicians if I had an exhaustive assessment of their entire career from multiple sources rather than a single sheet of paper that conferred a degree from however prestigious an institution.
Then, Cormier speaks of his own attempts to create a guild in a two-week course he conducted for Univ. of PEI: The difficulty with the course scenario, however, is that the forced community tends to fall apart after the course. Many more formal attempts have been made to create this kind of community, but they face significant challenges. A case study made of the Education Network of Ontario illustrates many of the pitfalls of trying to sustain long-term interest and participation in an online community of practice. It was a 12-year project that began in the days of dial-up and, due to the inevitable challenges implicit in sustaining a long-term community, eventually ended in 2005.
Why is falling apart a problem? One advantage of online relationships and rhizomatic communities is that they can be totally ad-hoc, provisional, for the moment. If anything lasts beyond the moment, then it lasts for some other moment, some new situation. No problem. Rhizomatic structures do not suffer from reshaping, sheering, morphing, or asignifying ruptures, to borrow the language of Deleuze and Guattari, nor is there any expectation that a given shape or composition of a community will persist beyond the immediate need for a given shape and a given composition. This is, of course, problematic for those of us raised in traditional hierarchical organizations, who need clearly defined boundaries, roles, members, and objectives.
I'll bring up one last response to Dave's post. He says: The multiple memberships that make up online community participation can be overwhelming. --Yes, but isn't that disorientation a clear illustration of our unfamiliarity with rhizomatic structures? I think we are disoriented only because we have an expectation of both a defined body of knowledge that we can cover and encompass and over which we can demonstrate mastery and a defined body of people with whom we can form lasting, continuing relationships. When we relax those expectations and open ourselves to exploring whatever rhizome we are in, then we can forget mastery and focus on careful mapping of our territory and our movement.
To use Delueze and Guattari's distinction between tracing and mapping, online communities allow us to exchange our demonstrations of competence in tracing over the prescribed knowledge for the dynamic mapping of new knowledge. However, if you are expecting to trace, then finding nothing to trace can be very disorienting.
bnleez says: Groups, Networks, Communities, and Guilds
As I'm still trying to get my head around Dave's notion of guild and community, the following are my first reactions (with the understanding that I'm willing and able to change my mind if someone can talk me out of the way I see it at this particular moment):
The idea of a guild reminds me of taking online graduate courses where we were required to complete a couple of group projects by developing a team charter. The team charter outlined who would do what, when, how, etc. with timelines, goals, and a reflection piece. Most of my experience with working with others in this manner was certainly less than desirable to say the least. If I were lucky enough to be grouped (and I see it as a group by Dave's definition) with the right people, it was a great experience in that we achieved the goals or objectives of the task (whether it was an excellent learning experience, I'm not so sure). For me, this type of learning environment is still a group regardless if the goals and the objectives are developed by the group itself or come directly from a syllabus. I'm not saying that this type of environment can't work in certain situations (perhaps in small groups), but thinking in terms of a team charter or something similar for an entire class is not a way I would like to structure a course.
I've always had a hard time defining community in a way that helps describe the way I prefer to learn. I usually end up using the term in a very general sense in ways that include both groups and networks (using Dave's definition), or perhaps what Barabási refers to as the "continents of a directed network" (p. 166) where islands or fragmented networks are also part of the community. Anyway, I still like to refer to the way in which I learn as a "connective" network as opposed to a "collective" network (my understanding of how George defines the two).
I tend to think of MOOCs (i.e., massive open online courses) in what Barabási terms as a "modular scale-free network" (p. 234). Basically, he states that a hierarchical network can provide the best means for multitasking whereby the most connected nodes (i.e., Dave and George or the notion of Ed Futures) have a higher "clustering coefficient" (i.e., how participants in this course interact with content and each other). What are some ways to increase the participants' interaction with content and each other? One way is through the various tools used in this course: Drupal site, individual blogs, Twitter, Elluminate, etc. Another way is to create hierarchical networked modules by grouping individuals that link members to George and Dave or to the content covered in the class. Finally, networked modules can link participants directly to Dave and George via content. That is, content can be partitioned off such that participants have a more directed link to certain concepts while still maintaining links to the rest of the network.
A connected network (which I'll refer to now simply as "network") for me is still the best way to look at how individuals learn. If I care enough to be part of a network, I care how much others learn within that network because part of my own learning resides there. When one considers the ties or relationships we have with people and content and the attributes that make up each node of our network, learning becomes more of a connective rationality.
I do agree that working within a network should always include support and guidance, and this course is a good example of that. What I'm not sure about is whether we need a social contract or something similar to achieve this support and guidance.
I look forward to learning more about the notions of a guild, community, networks, and groups as we progress throughout this course.
ekendriss says: learning and guilds....and a data profile of US
I have had a learning experience similar to what Dave describes, this year. Ongoing, in fact. It makes me *believe* in networked learning experiences. In fact, I could probably do a blog on professional uses for Facebook, I use it that way so often. I need to understand more about the guild concept, but don't we have to know one another, at least a little, for us to be a guild? Don't we need to know what special expertise we all bring to the table? I've been feeling a bit lost primarily because I usually have to address myself to someone's userid. [Note: what I propose next doesn't address this problem, exactly, but is motivated by it!]
What I want to do is start an Introductions thread, but I'd love to be able to display the data rather than have us scroll through 550+ posts. It's not so important we know each individual, but it would be helpful to know the group's profile. We need some sort of picture of who we are!
***DAVE: is there a wiki feature here so we could all edit an Excel spreadsheet? Or is there a way to create a form (that could export data to Excel) to ask for 5 words each of us would use to describe skills we could share with the group? Do you know if anyone else has more sophisticated data analysis tools or data visualization tools at their disposal? Or a programmer who deals with this type of data display challenge routinely? I hope someone else thinks this might be useful and that we can do something about it.
Kay
Come to think of it, where is one of those silly Facebook apps when you need one? Haven't we seen ones that would word cloud our posts, show our relationships, and in short, visualize the data?
nilspete says: Are "we" a Guild -- who you mean "we"?
I think from the presentation I am getting the idea that the "we" is an educational institution. Some intentional structuring, some hope to create community among learners.
I find myself working in a different context, with the faculty on issues of program-level assessment. The situation is a bit different. The programs have a problem, meet the changing requirements for university accreditation. The members of the programs are not willing members of a learning community, they are practitioners with competing duties. At one level, the problem is imposed on them -- university accreditation -- on another level the problem is one of their own choosing -- how to I support learning in my class and across my program.
I think I'm more with Scott Leslie, there is no course in this learning community. In fact the members have common cause in a shared problem, but at least initially, no overt sense they are even a community.
see: http://communitylearning.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/building-a-learning-co...