Hacking the Curriculum & Open Source Learning

Foreword for David Preston’s Open Source Learning (Not yet published)

By Howard Rheingold

Thank you, Mrs. Burch, for re-igniting my passion for learning by starting me out with something I was already eager to learn. Although sixty years have passed, I still remember the name and face of the fifth grade teacher who cared enough to start our educational relationship with an activity I personally cared about. She and what she had done for me came to mind again as I learned about David Preston and his radical strategy of trusting students to take their learning seriously when they centered it on their own interests.

I had some serious trouble in fifth grade. The teacher hated me. Granted, I was probably a smartass, and definitely a redhead with a mischievous look on my face. But to this day I believe she didn’t like me because I knew more than she did about some things and was unabashedly vocal about it. She actually dunced me – made me sit in a corner, facing the wall. I was so unhappy that instead of walking to school, I spent the day in the orange grove behind our house, reading science fiction. Of course, this lasted no longer than a day. When my parents and I were summoned to the principal’s office, my parents insisted that I wasn’t the problem (thank you, parents!). They transferred me to another school.

When I arrived at the new school and reported to Mrs. Burch’s classroom, she immediately took me aside and told me that her class published a “newspaper,” a mimeographed three-sheet collection of articles about what was going on around school. “We are approaching deadline,” she told me: “and we need someone to interview the principal right away. Would you like to do that?” I still remember that when the principal asked if I needed him to spell “principal” for me, I told him I had it covered. And I remember that he was impressed. Interesting that I remember very little else about the fifth grade, but that particular day and the day in the orange grove still stand out so crisply in my memory.

Did Mrs. Burch intuit (or learn from my mother, also a teacher) that I had an interest in writing? Or did she ignite it? In any case, she hit a bull’s eye: I spent my entire adult working life as a writer and spent ten years as a teacher. It’s not possible to determine whether or not that day channeled me into a writing career, but without a doubt it remains my most vivid positive recollection of my elementary school years. That class, that day, and its consequences reverberated in my memory again when I encountered David Preston. I was teaching at Stanford at the time, and dropped in on the Institute for the Future, which was just down the street from campus, in time to hear Dr. Preston’s presentation on what he calls “Open Source Learning.”

At the time I met Preston, I was conducting written and video interviews with innovators in digital media and learning for the MacArthur Foundation-funded “Digital Media and Learning” website.  In my interview, Preston talked about “hacking the curriculum” by inviting his students to co-design their syllabus and encouraging them to use digital media – blogs, videos, videoconference interviews, collaborative documents – to explore topics that they decided upon together. In addition to interest-based learning and digital media, Preston encouraged metacognitive learning by challenging students to examine how they were going about learning. 

Trusting students to take over some of the responsibility for their learning is scary for teachers. Scary because of a fear that students will act irresponsibly if not tightly constrained, and scary because principals are expected to be skeptical. When I encountered this fear during my three years of interviewing educators, I was happy to point them to David Preston. My own teaching was also transformed: I began to call my college students “co-learners;” it seemed like a minor semantic tactic before I did it, but quickly learned that when a teacher authorizes cooperation around mutual learning, the learners take it seriously. I invited co-learner teams of three to co-teach with me, taking responsibility for leading learning activities and discussions for one-third of our class time. My fears were replaced by enthusiasms when students proved to be more than trustworthy – in every case, they grew more and more enthusiastic as they learned how they could apply our learning objectives to their own interests.

If I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t trust my students more radically, earlier in my teaching career. During the last course I taught at Stanford, after the first three sessions, I wrote in blue on the whiteboard all the learning activities I required: forum posts, blog posts, co-teaching teams, collaborative lexicon building, individual projects. Then I wrote my phone number on the whiteboard and told them I was going to walk around campus while they re-engineered the required learning activities to fit their own requirements. They could text me with questions, then text me when they were ready for me to return. I had a few questions, and after 45 minutes I was invited to return. The co-learners had revised, in red marker, the list of required learning activities. We talked about why they preferred these changes (bringing in the metacognitive element of student-centered pedagogy), then ran the course that way. I wish I had not waited until my final course to try this! In an ideal world, I could meet with co-learners for several hours online and offline before the course is scheduled to start, and they could help co-design my draft syllabus.

We are all fortunate now that David has laid out how and why this student-centric learning works, how digital media can enhance collaborative project-based learning, and how to go about applying what Preston learned through his own brave rethinking of trust, responsibility, interest, and collaboration in high school classrooms. I won’t be surprised when elementary and college level teachers begin experimenting. Build at least some of the required learning – sources, skills, principles, methods – around projects that enlist learners’ enthusiasm. Let them know they are both trusted and expected to be responsible. Encourage them to understand how they learn most effectively and why. Yes, it’s scary. And yes, the payoff is worth it.