Open to learning in sharing – creating in common

The first topic around entering and co-creating grounds for participation in learning, touched upon the underlying theme of establishing premises for trust, courage and vulnerability in interactive relationships. It related to different motives, incentives and overall purposes for education/life-long learning and wider educative journeys. The specific challenges, perils and opportunities for teaching and learning over the on-line-medium was captured in the concepts of being residences or visitors in the medium, depending on how cultivated in its literacies one is, and probably one interchangeable shifts position in different on-line contexts.

The next topic around openness and sharing online are for me anchored in the same qualities of complexity and spilling over into the third topic of collaboration. Therefore, this text are two blogs in one. The core of the matter for me centres around how open we can be for sharing and how that is framed by what rules of engagement that we are obliged to, can participatorily co-create and/or performatively understand in practice. Ragupathi (2020) captures in nicely. 

Thus, it is important for each of us as individuals to be aware of and take ownership of how we as a community pledge to be open. It is also very much a matter of being aware of what open is, so that we can adjust our level of being open based on specific context, the appropriate time and place.

I like the triangulation of commons, generosity and responsibility as an entrance to the topic of openness and sharing. This interesting and difficult dilemma about the open access and the commons and the possibility to be generous as a voluntary responsibility is an attractive stance (that David Wiley, really embodied in a surprising way in his ted-talk). The online-landscape bear witness to many scenarios of an opposite character. It is a difficult paradox to make substantially plausible, but possible to express in an enacted way. He really addressed the potentials in the same breath as he showed the controlling horrors of death penalties and tortures that pushing for openness released in humans in the historical times of the invention of the printing press. Addressing these almost impossible potentials of sharing openly in generosity in a non-naïve way opens up for scrutinizing a bit deeper what can unlock or block it out. What does it take to be actualized in learning through one-self and the other and the online techniques in meaningful ways in online contexts? Who is in charge, what governs us, who have access on what conditions?

I think there is an even deeper and wider expansion of experiencing that lies in the root-causes of social injustice that is suggested to be addresses through re-structuring, re-acculturating and re-framing the social injustice dimension (Bali et al, 2020). It raises the more existential, philosophical ongoing question of a dual or non-dual paradigmatic experiencing. The dual tension in the relation of having and not having, taking and not taking, sharing and not sharing etc, when it is experienced from a sense of insecurity, fear and instinctive non-reflective survival mode, will raise a reactive filter of either or, fixed excluding oppositions and a competitiveness, grabbing the opportunity on the expense of others, and almost making that morally legitimate as rationalisation. The fear of being socially excluded and unsuccessful and surviving lurk under every polished surface, concept and attitude – in the micro- educational environment as well as under the correct online business structures that develop resources for the educational field (Bali, 2020). I find the non-openness, non-sharing responses also embedded in the economisation of education and the language through which we talk about education (Biesta, 2006, p. 28, se consumer-oriented terminology of costumers and giving service), which is also described as played out by different players in the “business” of education online (Bali, 2020).

Tragedies or creativity in the commons

There are parallel features and learnings to be captured between the online world development around how to share, control or govern common ground and the real-world territories. What is happening in the online world viewed through the field of education can be captured in parallel stories and knowledge cultivated about the human ability and disability to establish sustainable playgrounds and rules of engagement for handling natural resources. In her work Governing the commons, the 2009 years Noble price winning Elinor Ostrom (1997) share her lifelong research all around the world. She gained her understanding by studying different successful social systems, and ways of being organised around handling a common resource. The conditions are that everyone around the resource – of for example water or fish – is dependent on it, but many have totally different interests in it. Ostrom came to a very interesting and crass conclusions that are implicated to have bearings for what happens in the internet context (Stockholm resilience centre, 2017). 

She initially understood something along the line of the historical example that was so dramatically framed in the talk by Davie Wiley. When he connects the control forces that are leached in relation to the possibilities of openness in sharing on the inter-net to the ones that showed their faces in the revolution of the printing techniques in the 1600, the question of power-relations, understanding and seeing one’s own cultural blind spots might seem overdramatised. But since Bordieu, Foucault, Butler and the unfoldment of the critical thinker in us all that keeps making transparent how the forces of oppression, ignorance, injustice etc are being internalised as well as externalised, we know that the face of that dictatorship has many street-smart versions of itself within and without. 

Manging common resources together in a sustainable long-term way, Ostrom showed, does not happen in big cooperation’s that have tight control, but in smaller contexts with looser and flexible agreements. After that she looked closer and closer into what actually made it work. She saw that people will be able to handle common resources sustainably, without central regulation or economic incentives, if you put them all in the same room eye to eye and let them co-construct their own agreements around how to do this in ways that meet everyone’s interests within the borders of the premises greater than everyone, in this case the ecology of the earth itself. So, people did not find ways neither because they were nice, totally altruistic or repressing their self-interest. They found ways because of the paradigmatic shift in understanding and consent that they were all interdependent with each other on the wealth and long-term well-being of the common itself and a resilient use of the resources. A form of eco-awareness greater than any individual ego-awareness (Scharmer, 2009). Another important premis’ was also that they agreed on established sanctions for what happens if you do not follow the agreement. I suggest that this social carrying-capacity is built on the same underlying principles as play, in which you establish a consent around in which situation with what rules of engagement you are in, and the trust comes when you can sense the reciprocity in the exchange of engagement, and take turns in receiving and giving, leading and following in co-creating how to play out the management in action. An interesting note is that this finding went against all the theories of the tragedies of the commons, in which people would egoistically use resources on the behalf of others and the greater renewable limits of the resources, and that you need a strong governmental centralised or private interest to counteract that. The resilience centre even tried this out in practice, inviting the stake-holders in the macro-relational-environment of governing the commons of fishing, to meet face to face and establish their own agreements, face to face. It did work (Resilience centre, 2017).

We may have the capacity to cultivate similar conditions in educational micro- and macro environments that are not just terror-balances but anchors us in a deeper human understanding of our mutual interdependencies in the greater web of life. Inspired by the even bolder sense of freedom in generosity expressed by Wiley (2010), and giving up of the ego-awareness in order to enter a common eco-awareness (Sharmer), allowing us to not know in order to authentically learn… I end with this poem by David Whyte, which hold a promise in this orientation of the pathway… by getting to know ourselves in surprising ways:

Tilicho Lake

In this high place
it is as simple as this,
Leave everything you know behind.

Step toward the cold surface,
say the old prayer of rough love
and open both arms.

Those who come with empty hands
will stare into the lake astonished,
there, in the cold light
reflecting pure snow,
the true shape of your own face.

David Whyte

Bali, M, et al. 2020. Framing Open Educational Practices from a Social Justice Perspective. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020(1): 10,pp.1–12.DOI:https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.565

Biesta, G. (2006). Beyond learning – Democratic education for a human future. (Bortom lärandet – Demokratisk utbildning för en mänsklig framtid). Lund, Sweden; Studentlitteratur.

Ragupathi, K (2020)

Whyte, D. (2012) River flow – New & Selected poems. Many Rivers press.

Wiley, D. (2010): Ted-Nyed- Talk, retrieved 21.03.25 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb0syrgsH6M

Resilience centre (2017). Curiosity leads to development (Nyfikenhet leder till utveckling). Film about Elinor Ostrom. retrieved 21.04.27. from https://www.forskning.se/2017/11/02/nyfikenhet-leder-till-utveckling/

Creative collective transparency and in collaborative learning 

The perception of an asymmetric collaboration among the teammates was identified by the students as the most important source of frustration. Online learners also identified difficulties related to group organization, the lack of shared goals among the team members, the imbalance in the level of commitment and quality of the individual contributions, the excess time spent on the online CSCL tasks, the imbalance between the individual and collective grades, and difficulties in communication, among other factors leading to frustration. (Capdeffero & Romero, 2012)

I will share one approach to meet group work dysfunctionalities in practice. It was at least a process that ameliorated everyone’s option and ability, to handle and meet in alternative ways the frustrations of asymmetry in non-mutual and non-reciprocal exchanges inherent in social patterns of malfunctional phenomena of groupwork. In our explorative sharing of different stories in the online course that counteracted the habitual patterns, we discerned one important variation in strategies to help groups fall into playful and relationally creative and reciprocal ways of contributing to the collective group process. One was indirect, in the form of icebreakers and exercises that invited prestige less and non-competitive interactions, awakening curiosity and building relationships. That relaxed and spontaneous atmosphere carried over into sharing r and feeling safe and invited to contribute. Other strategies had to do with being direct and make inter-subjectively transparent the complexity and variety of underlying thoughts, feelings and patterns that non-consciously operates to create frustration. This process here belongs to the second category.   

In this example I framed a way to make the implicit underground known as a collective common, not pointing out anyone in particular, but making everyone’s experience of both what is causing troubles and ways to move out of them precious knowledge to share and build collective awareness with. Before we even started to work with a group assignment, I addressed the question of “worst scenarios” in groupwork and started to map everyone’s joint experience of it on the board. In theatre terms I asked us all to look at this phenomenon as variations of a theatre play that has a social script and in which we as characters often play out explicit roles in verbal and embodied action. This communication holds a lot of implicit information (under-texts), beneath and often contrasting the polite lines, correct suggestions or non-communicative attitudes. From a systemic point of view, we were identifying what Gregory Bateson (1935, s 181, N. Bateson, 2021) called schizmogenesis, ways that a system falls apart as we create (genesis) breaks (schismo) in relationships sooner or later, rather than building them by tending, caring and sharing reciprocally and through them. In the first category of complementary responses, you have all the initially functioning but as a fixed pattern deeply inequal ways of getting stuck and identified in binary roles: One person leading and the others fill in, or someone, or someone actively divert and questions everything without coming with alternatives and the rest just ends up running in different directions, someone is pushing someone les is withdrawing. The second category has to do with symmetric responses as in competition in which the tone and way in which you communicate you knowing has the implicit meta-message of that you know better, or that this is how it is – period. It triggers a competitive response in someone else. Even if there can be momentary fun or creative energy released in that, some people fall of the wagon and it soon blocks the real process. The third category; system holdback (coined by N. Bateson, 2021) is a response that builds up, sometimes as compilation of many of the other schitzomogenetic approaches. It builds by the fact that you feel that the other is not showing up fully, not sharing freely (maybe of fear of being used, or not being good enough or whatever). You start to hold back yourself as a response, and finally no one is giving energy or real information or materials, and the whole process shrinks.

So, what I had us do was that all of us had to go into all of the common positions and roles, and we explored what the real need underneath the behaviour could be. Like someone who do not contribute and fade away, we imagined might do that because they feel uncertain about the process and not being able to perform good enough. We then in a collective creative process imagined different variations of mutual invitations and initiatives from the different role positions and the group, back into engagement. For example, if that person knew hen could be transparent “with hens not knowing yet”, but wanting to learn, hen could suggest, to take on a process, with the addition to maybe be able to have assistance and commit to concrete things to learn and also taking responsibility for carrying it through. Someone in the group could also take initiative in offering a co-learning process around something that would be of interest for that person to share. Someone in the role of “taking on a great workload, maybe was driven by… and needed etc. So, from this process of making the variations of the whole dilemma inter-personally transparent and develop a source of collective co-responsible creativity and imaginings another starting relationships built and a mutual understanding of the challenges in every position. The possible mutually established alternative co-active routs out of the pre-identified dilemmas that often can occur – augmented the quality of mutual understanding and listening for authentic options of traveling this joint internal and external landscape, communicating about real needs and abilities to learn more, as resource. The group had a totally new tone, transparency, and preparation for being involved. 

Another source of frustration specific to the online-environment discussed in the article by Capdeffero & Romero (2012) is the “reduced level of cues within the social activity and context (Rettie, 2003; Sallnäs, 2004, in Capdeferro & Romero, 2012). The attention to extra-sensitivities in the bodies, the tones in voices, gestures proximities in the space, the signals from the contextual environment and the underground implicit information in communication is deeply involved in embodied drama. As I shared in my first blog there was a very surprising moment in which I found a new way to have those qualities of multi-modal communication to click in, rather than being reduced.

Bateson, G. (1935). Culture contact and Schismogenesis. Man (35) 178-183. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

Bateson, N. (1921), Verbal source in teachings about Warm Data Lab.

Capdeferro, N. & Romero, M. (2012). Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences?. The International review of research in open and distance learning, 13(2), 26-44.