Dean Christopher Capozzola explains how his work as a historian informs his understanding of the challenges and opportunities presented by new technologies.
As MIT’s Senior Associate Dean for Open Learning, Christopher Capozzola’s job is to look forward, identifying new opportunities and facing new challenges in online and digital learning. But he’s also a professor of American history. In that capacity, his job also requires him to study the opportunities and challenges people faced in the past—and, in the classroom, to make those past events meaningful to young people in the present. In this episode, Prof. Capozzola draws analogies between the present moment and the late 1800s, when new communication technologies and systems for organizing and presenting information transformed the world. Just like in the 19th century, he says, we’re facing questions about the trustworthiness of the flood of information we’re exposed to, as well as about how to democratize access to that information in order to achieve a more equitable society. In overseeing MIT OpenCourseWare and other programs in MIT Open Learning, Prof. Capozzola says, he’s on a mission to make information both trustable and discoverable, and to seek out—and collaborate with—the innovators and philanthropists (the “Deweys and Carnegies” of today) who can support that mission.
Relevant Resources:
Prof. Capozzola’s faculty page
The Dewey decimal classification system (PDF)
21H.221 The Places of Migration in United States History on MIT OpenCourseWare
21H.223 War & American Society on MIT OpenCourseWare
21H.224 Law and Society in US History on MIT OpenCourseWare
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
[MUSIC PLAYING] CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZOLA: When I explain to people what my job is like, I always say that I'm somewhere in between a chief executive of a edtech startup and the faculty advisor to a high school AV club that has grown out of control.
SARAH HANSEN: [LAUGHS] That's exactly what your job is.
CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZOLA: Yes, so it's a really kind of remarkable and creative space in that way.
SARAH HANSEN: Today on Chalk Radio, I'm talking with Christopher Capozzola, Senior Associate Dean for Open Learning at MIT. Part of his job is to provide strategic direction for MIT OpenCourseWare, but that's not his only role here at MIT.
CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZOLA: I'm also a professor of history. So I've been teaching here for about 20 years, and I teach American history. So I teach everything from the American revolution all the way to what's happening in the news this week.
SARAH HANSEN: Chris sees his role at the helm of Open Learning as very well connected to his background as a professor of history. And I found it fascinating how his knowledge of American history informs his vision for OCW's future.
I'd like to draw on your expertise as a historian to think about OCW when it started. You mentioned earlier, that it was kind of an audacious move in the early 2000s. And I'm wondering if you could draw parallels to any other movements in history where people tried to do something differently? They weren't sure what the outcome would be. What they learned that could inform where we take OCW in the future.
CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZOLA: So about 150 years ago, between the 1870s and the 1890s, the United States and the rest of the world went through an information revolution. Transformations in communication technologies that gave us things like the telegraph, the telephone, and transformations, also in information and publishing, new inventions, photography, mass photography, printing of newspapers and images, the mass circulation of books, cheap paperback books.
Other things like that that people in the 1870s and '80s also lived in a world in which there were new possibilities for knowledge, both its production and its dissemination, and new questions about the trustworthiness of what they were seeing and reading.
And also, I think another key element of this is, new technologies for organizing that information. So I warned you, I'm a history nerd. And so I'm going to tell you about a very nerdy moment in American history, which is the invention of the Dewey decimal system.
SARAH HANSEN: I love it, OK.
CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZOLA: In 1876, Melvil Dewey, who was a librarian at Amherst college here in Massachusetts, realized that the books in the library were just badly organized. And so he developed the Dewey Decimal System, which many of us know from the elementary school library class. But it's the foundation of information science, and it's a way of organizing knowledge.
At the same time, another transformation is happening in libraries, which is the innovations of the Carnegie Library, designed to bring books and knowledge to communities all around the country. And so if we think about it, we have technological innovation, we have specific innovations around information and knowledge organization, and we have a critical role of foundations and other players in democratizing that information.
Now, in the 1870s and '80s, that didn't go far enough. Libraries, particularly in the South, were racially segregated. Those technologies of information could sometimes be used as much to organize and discipline workers and ethnic groups as to share that knowledge. But everything that we're going through right now, we've been there before.
The lessons are that, as with many other technological innovations and also efforts to democratize technologies, is that we need to build in equity from the beginning, that we need to be asking, who are these for? Who are we trying to reach? Who are the users? How do they guide us to share and preserve information in a valuable and meaningful and equitable ways? So that's a lesson.
What this might tell us for where OCW should go next, is that we have challenges for how to preserve the massive amount of information that is generated on our campus every day. Thousands of hours of video, thousands and thousands of pages of learning beyond a lecture from a professor at the front of the room.
So much learning is happening in chat. It's happening on the sidebars of a class. But we have to make it discoverable. It's one thing to put 1,000 hours of video online, but how can you find the five minutes that you're interested in? And we have to make it trustable. We need, not only to find the Andrew Carnegies of today to support us to make it possible, we need to find the Melvil Deweys of today who can help us come up with the version of the Dewey Decimal System. But the special challenge we face today, is to make it trustworthy.
SARAH HANSEN: As you, a listener of this show, are probably already aware, the core of OCW's mission is making education open, equitable, and available to the world. In the age of generative AI, products like ChatGPT are bringing into question both what the future of education looks like and how equitably it can be disseminated. As he looks to OCW's future, I was curious how Chris imagines generative AI impacting, for better or for worse, teaching and learning.
CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZOLA: Some of the very first responses from educators were defensive-- how do we shut it down? --and also distrustful of learners. Students are going to use it to cheat. We all heard this. It's going to write the essays. No one's ever going to write an essay again, et cetera.
And being defensive and distrustful is usually not the best way to be a good teacher. I feel like most instructors at MIT, are in that phase between trying to stop ChatGPT and other tools and completely embracing them. In between, there's a space of curiosity, and that's, I think, where we'll be most productive.
Obviously, there are challenges with academic integrity that came up in the very first days after these products came to market. And for some of the other offerings we have in Open Learning, the MITx courses and so forth, those conversations are happening. But those were already happening.
And trying to figure out how to ensure that learners use these tools to advance their learning, rather than to shortcut it, is it's not an enforcement game. It's actually it's a conversation. It's an ongoing conversation. Every instructor is now going to be forced to spend more time explaining why they are making students do a task. That's a good thing because it's only going to make learners more reflective of why they're learning.
SARAH HANSEN: What struck me about my conversation with Chris, was how important it is in all of his work to spend time in this middle space of curiosity and reflectiveness that he talks about. He explained how he creates an environment in which his students can engage in reflection. It starts the moment they walk in the door.
CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZOLA: My students find this very awkward at first, But you can't come into my class without saying hello, and I might even shake your hand. And you. You have to know the names of every other student in the room. And I actually give a quiz, sometimes, to make sure that students know it. And that's really just, really basic, crucial step to understanding that this is a collective enterprise and not a spectator sport.
If you know the names of everyone else in the room, and if you've said hello to all of them, the tone just changes immediately. I've the good fortune at MIT of teaching small enough classes where we can do that.
SARAH HANSEN: Chris shared some strategies he uses to help students reflect on the complexities that have shaped decisions made throughout history.
CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZOLA: I like to give them very real-world, puzzle-based, problem-based moments of the past, where people were making decisions. And they're not necessarily decisions about technology. I generally don't teach that much about the history of specific technologies but where they might have been facing a political choice or a legal dilemma or a question of how to structure a political economy in a moment and then make them realize just basically how complicated it is.
And that, I think, can be very important to bear in mind, in their own lives, decades later, when they're confronting choices in their profession or in their political lives or whatever, when they might have to realize, oh, it's complicated.
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah, introducing complexity and recognizing that, acknowledging it, I think that's really important. So especially in history, how do you create a classroom culture where people can express dissenting views, take on challenging topics?
CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZOLA: I can't say I've gotten it right every time. And it's a moving target as our culture shifts and as people come into class with different expectations. There's no one answer to these questions. I think part of it is, the importance of structured discussion, which is to say, before you state a position, it's important to know what the landscape of possible positions is and to articulate them. And so encouraging students, not just to know that there is a counter-argument, but actually to state it. And then they can navigate where they fit within that.
SARAH HANSEN: It was inspiring to hear how Chris infuses the values of reflectiveness and openness, not just into his teaching, but also into our work here at MIT OpenCourseWare.
CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZOLA: There are plenty of researchers at MIT who would love if a few million more people understood what they did every day. And OpenCourseWare can play a really kind of crucial role in making that possible. We have a special role to play in translating it, and in part by feeding back to the MIT community what learners on OpenCourseWare are curious about, what they're hungry to know about, and at what level of technical rigor and scientific advance they can follow it.
We've actually only begun to imagine what's possible in those spaces, and I think it's less in the delivery of content and more in the meaningfulness and authenticity of the actual learning experience.
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SARAH HANSEN: That was Chris Capozzola, Professor of History and Senior Associate Dean for Open Learning at MIT. In addition to providing strategic direction for MIT OpenCourseWare, he's also contributed materials from three of his courses to the OCW collection.
On our website, you can find syllabi, readings, assignments, and other resources from 21H.221 The Places of Migration in United States History, 21H.223 War and American Society and 21H.224 Law and Society in US History. We'll put the links to these courses in the show notes for you.
Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, signing off from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Sarah Hansen, from MIT OpenCourseWare. MIT Chalk Radio's producers include myself, Brett Paci, and Dave Lishansky. Show notes for this episode were written by Peter Chipman.
Chris Capozzola's OCW course sites were built by Reese Jenkins. Jason Player made our episode cassette animation on YouTube. We're funded by MIT Open Learning and supporters like you.
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