abject learning

There have been a couple of notable resources that have crossed my screen lately that merit a shout-out:

* The first drafts of the ongoing OER Handbook have been posted on the ultra-yummy WikiEducator site. If you are wanting to be more active in the open education space there are heaps of useful pieces on the creation, sharing and reuse of open educational resources.

* Via George Siemens, this Wikibook on Web 2.0 and Emerging Learning Technologies, assembled by by Curt Bonk and a global cast of collaborators, looks most useful.

Now, since both of these resources are openly licensed, and authored on the MediaWiki platform, I can’t resist noting that the Wiki Inc. plugin (blogged by Jim Groom here) would allow any WordPress publisher to incorporate these pages with a simple copy-paste of a URL.

And when the source is updated, your reuse of it will be updated as well.

For example, here’s the Adapt page for the OER Handbook, and the Digital Divide chapter of the Emerging Technologies Wikibook over on UMWBlogs, which as previously noted is making fine use of this approach to manage its WordPress user support documentation.

Now, are those your brains on the floor, or did I just blow your mind? In all seriousness, this sort of thing may seem simplistic given some of the flashier technology buzzing across our screens these days, but to me the combo of easy-as-possible open content authoring mixed with simple dynamic reuse (all within a context of free open source tools) is a broad approach with significance well beyond the toolset.

Update: D’Arcy has assembled a nifty screencast demonstrating how the Wiki Inc plugin works. And isn’t the homepage of ucalgaryblogs.ca a thing of beauty?

Traveling without moving by FredArmitage

I have largely suppressed my memories of being UBC’s ‘learning objects project coordinator’ 5 or 6 years back. But I do vividly recall the drive to develop a robust form of “federated search” that would allow users to search across a range of locally-hosted learning resource collections. Were such a thing possible, some of us believed the skies would part and we would enter a blissful state of findability and connectedness. Of course, it wouldn’t be easy. We would need to carefully catalogue our materials using a detailed and often mysterious metadata specification, and our local repositories would similarly be required to meet rigorous standards, perhaps implementing a painstakingly developed communication layer to connect these pieces together. Expensive, arduous, tedious, and confusing. But surely the payoff would be worth it…

Or, we can just let Google do it for us for free with a few minutes work. Here’s a recipe for rich, chocolatey, open educational searchy goodness, adapt it to your own tastes.

* Assemble your ingredients. ZaidLearn saved us a lot of hassle by assembling this handy list of open educational resource (OER) sites.

* You knew that Google already allows you to set up your custom search engine by whatever domains you wanted, right? So Tony Hirst took the ZaidLearn list and used it to quickly create an OER Search Engine. You can put the search box anywhere you want, including right here, just by cutting and pasting a little HTML:

* Then Scott gets it into his disturbingly shaved head to have the list of supported search domains run off of a wiki, so anybody can come in and add resources collections. I added a few bits, including the Creative Commons rich media search, though it might be necessary to paste in some of the specific collections.

It seems to work pretty well. Sure enough, my search on “Willinsky” not only brings up a fantastic presentation John Willinsky gave at UBC last fall that’s hosted on Blip.tv, it also turned me on to this tantalizing set of talks on the economics of open content that I was previously unaware of.

The technology cost is negligible. Someone like Tony can go into the Google Ajax Search API and/or work some Yahoo Pipes magic to do even cooler stuff — but even an idiot like me can do quite a bit with some cutting, pasting and wiki editing.

As far as I know, Zaid Ali Alsagoff, Tony Hirst and Scott Leslie have never met, and there is no coordinating body to facilitate their collaboration. What is required (in addition to Google’s scary hegemonic presence providing a powerful platform) is openness. The resources need to be indexed on the open web, and when people do cool stuff and then blog about it, others can take the work to unexpected places.

A coda. I’m not sure if Google’s Dynamic Feed Control Wizard fits into this picture, but it is kind of nifty. All I have to do is type “zaidlearn, ouseful info, edtechpost” into the “Feeds Expression” field, and Google finds the feeds and quickly generates this customizable display:

@import url(“http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/dynamicfeed/gfdynamicfeedcontrol.css”);

function LoadDynamicFeedControl() {
var feeds = [
{title: ‘edtechpost’,
url: ‘http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/feed/’
},
{title: ‘zaidlearn’,
url: ‘http://zaidlearn.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default’
},
{title: ‘ouseful info’,
url: ‘http://feeds.feedburner.com/ouseful’
}];
var options = {
stacked : true,
horizontal : false,
title : “OER Engine Hero Roll”
}

new GFdynamicFeedControl(feeds, ‘feed-control’, options);
}
// Load the feeds API and set the onload callback.
google.load(‘feeds’, ‘1’);
google.setOnLoadCallback(LoadDynamicFeedControl);

Nifty post from Laura J. Murray (via Michael Geist) on the implications of Bill C-61 for Canadian online educators:

It says kindly that an electronically transmitted lesson will indeed count as a lesson in the eyes of the law. But it wants this lesson to behave just like a classroom lesson: when it’s over, it’s gone. The educational institution has to destroy it 30 days after marks go out (30.01(5)(a)), and must “take measures that can reasonably be expected to limit the communication by telecommunication of the lesson” to enrolled students. It must also do what it can “to prevent the students from fixing or reproducing the lesson.” Read that last one again: the Bill wants to make it impossible for distance-education students to keep course materials. Yes, that’s what it says.

I just can’t wait for the user-friendly DRM encoding some helpful vendor will provide to help us ensure that students can’t fix (?) or reproduce a lesson.

It gets better:

Now I suppose if you used no copyright material in your class you could ignore this clause, and go ahead, podcast, post notes online to the world, etc. But if like me you teach literature, and have a nasty habit of actually quoting it along the way, this provision of the Bill says you have to lock up your lectures. People will have to go to MIT to learn about American Literature — and they can even take that course in Chinese.

I was in a meeting just last week with a dynamic professor who had videotaped recordings of his lectures. They had been a hit with his students, he was interested in widening the scope and was amenable to public sharing with an open license. The video was playing as a room of various stakeholders talked through the logistics of publishing, when the screen flashed some momentary glimpses of third-party media that the prof had shown during his lecture. This media may well be copyrighted, we didn’t know… “Well, if we keep exposure to the video within the CMS we should be OK.” Locking down and closing access was the defense strategy. So much for open education. (Actually, I think this particular story will have a happier ending than that, but you get the point…)

And of course that exchange illustrates a dirty secret of the learning happening behind password-protected walls. Educators are taking materials (for instance, diagrams off of Google Image Search) from the public web all the time – and if it helps their students learn, then good for them. In any reasonable legal system, this would be considered fair dealing. But in the back of their minds, the practice leads them to fear exposure of their own work. Beneficial educational materials languish because authors don’t want to risk being branded as plagiarists or copyright thieves — simply because teachers do not have the time, resources or expertise to navigate the already arduous copyright regime. I would suggest that protection of copyright violation is a primary motivation for closed content models. A rationale that dare not speak its name.

If we are really interested in the sustainability of education in the coming decades, we need to get the word out on the vast quantity of freely licensed open educational materials that are already available. And of course, we need to add to the pool. David Wiley recently likened open reuse to an EduCarbon Footprint – and really, perpetuating this insane, unsustainable approach as it stands is a bit like driving a Hummer.

I’ve already quoted lots from Murray’s post, but can’t top how she closes:

…it traps us in a very limited vision of education, at just the time that technologies permit vast new possibilities.

I was raised on the ideas of the Antigonish Movement of adult education and group action, and I can’t help asking: Why not harness digital technologies to enable educators to reach out across distances within Canada and beyond? Why not demand a copyright law that will support this more open approach? A combination of fair dealing and collective licensing could work, if there were goodwill, imagination, and a level playing field for negotiations. I don’t want tiny frosted windows of exceptions: I want clean picture windows of clear principles for conduct.

By all means, let’s pressure our leaders for such clear principles. But to whatever extent we can act without depending on politicians… well, let’s get on with it.

I just saw on Twitter that Martin Weller (whose post on the gap between Web 2.0 and higher education is a must read) is submitting a proposal to this year’s Open Education Conference, hosted by Utah State University’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning on September 24-26. Which reminded me that I haven’t plugged the call for proposals yet.

This has been one of my favorite and most meaningful events for a long, long time. (See my posts from 2004, 2005, 2006 — and last year was an over-the-top blast.)

The conference is a fantastic mix of academic and practical topics, where open source technology, open content, sustainable models, and net culture mix into a delicious and sneaky subversive brew. And though Logan can seem a bit remote for travelers, the drive through the canyons of Utah to get there is stunningly beautiful, and the city itself has many charms – I’ve come to think of it as one of my adopted homes. Expect the COSL folks to run a conference that is logistically flawless, yet relaxed, friendly and fun.

Every day seems to hammer home the importance of openness in our practice. To offer up an observation from Mike Caulfield, “You need problems of sharing and openness to get people to understand the significance of the network… because the network, to some extent, is how we deal with a hackable, shareable world. Take away the hackable, shareable world, and what’s left for the network to do? Mail Hallmark e-cards or something I suppose.”

The Open Education Conference is one of those rare events where you can connect and work with a community that not only understands that reality, but who are actually shaking things up toward a hackable, sharable and genuinely open educational vision.