Thanks to my buddy Luke the Drifter for turning me on to a bunch of videos at his place last night. Did you know that minimalist composer Philip Glass did the music for a series of short films for the iconic kids show entitled Geometry of Circles back in 1979?
Trippy trippy… I grew up on a steady diet of this stuff, and knowing that allows me to understand my present sorry state a whole lot better. And may I add how delighted I am to have cited the Muppet Wiki?
In a comment to my recent ill-considered ramblings on OpenCourseWare, Leigh Blackall advocated ‘truly OPEN source and not just “free”‘ approaches to open education. Point taken — if there is one additional point I wish I had made in that original post, it is that open education takes many forms… I, for one, think that John Willinsky’s wiki combining authentic teacher training and a database of useful lesson plans is every bit as much a contribution to open education as a collection of PDF’ed lecture notes assembled as a course.
One of the sites Leigh cited as a natural platform for open educators is WikiEducator, which is a very impressive project with lots on the go.
One, via Stephen Downes, I learn that WikiEducator is piloting a collaborative video project that may eventually benefit Wikipedia and other MediaWiki-powered environments. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I have never heard of Kaltura, especially since they have gathered some buzz previously…
Two, WikiEducator will be leading a very cool ongoing web seminar as part of the Learning4Content project which looks like a great opportunity to hone MediaWiki authoring skills and also to get a sense of a novel pedagogical model. Gotta love the Learner Contract: in return for your training, you deliver an open educational resource. I’m signing up.
Finally, WikiEducator will be hosting the ongoing development of the OER Handbook. (Here’s the blog.)
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I’m still waiting to see the example that fully demonstrates its potential, but I think CommentPress (a very slick WordPress theme/hack from The Future of the Book) is going to end up being absolutely killer in higher education. Jim Groom blogged on its affordances some time ago, describing it as a “revolutionary nested comment functionality that re-imagines the space wherein you can have threaded conversations alongside the text to brilliantly capture the actual unfolding of a stream of textual ideas in-line.”
Now, Alan Levine of the NMC, who used CommentPress to great effect on the Evolution of Communication whitepaper brings joyous tidings that WordPress Multi-User is now able to support the theme. We have been making rapid process on our own WordPress hosting service lately, and I can now confidently announce we are moving up the date of launch to late June, 2012.
And since I consume Grand Text Auto in my RSS newsreader, I had no idea they were already there… I shouldn’t be surprised.
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I probably should put up a post about Seven Second Delay, or something, anything to interrupt this string of three consecutive posts that just recycle something David Wiley has posted… But for reasons I only dimly comprehend I receive a fairly steady stream of inquiries along the lines of “what’s the deal with [keeping/getting rid of] the NC clause?” and this post captures both positions in a remarkably accessible exchange.
First, this quite clever spoof of the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education:
Swansea, January 23rd, 2008—A coalition of edutainers, foundations, free-market capitalists, adult-entertainment providers, corporates and internet “pioneers” today urged governments and publishers to make publicly-funded educational materials available freely over the internet so that it could be sucked up into huge corporate-funded databases.
The Swansea Open Edutainment Declaration, launched today, is part of a dynamic effort to make learning and teaching materials available to everyone online, regardless of income or geographic location. Providing resources for bundling, advertising, service-based income and free-market exchange it encourages teachers and students around the world to join a growing movement and pay to use the web to share, remix and translate classroom materials to make educators’ labour cheaper more pliable, and more easily replaced if they happen to disagree.
…Open edutainment is of particular relevance in developing and emerging economies, creating the potential for the swamping them with US influenced “affordable” textbooks and learning materials supplied on One Laptop per Child (OLPC), expensive gadgets and the Internet. It opens the door to a small elite class to use the labour of local content producers likely to create more diverse offerings than large multinational publishing houses. Of course, then the large multinational publishing houses are freely able to use it.
The Declaration has already been translated into over one language and the growing list of signatories includes: lots of rich people, some people you have never heard of, the usual suspects and, of course, our dear leader Lawrence Lessig.
The cutting nature of this jab has prodded David into responding with perhaps the sharpest, certainly the most passionate, defense of the model that I’ve read from him:
Though it’s dangerous and often wrong to analogize open education with open source, this is one case in which we may safely do so. Try to imagine the current state of Linux if the GPL contained a noncommercial clause… That is, try to imagine a Linux without Ubuntu. Try to imagine Linux without Transmeta supporting Linus. Try to imagine Linux without RedHat supporting Alan Cox. Try to imagine universities or governments deploying Linux if technical support weren’t commercially available from RedHat. Try to imagine Linux without hardware vendor support from Penguin Computing, VA, IBM, or Dell.
If in your mind you’re already asking “who cares whether or not universities or governments deploy? We’re trying to empower the people, not multinational corporations. And who calls tech support?” then you can stop reading right here. You seem comfortable living in the elitist world where only the uber-geeks need the benefits of open source. And since they already have them, congratulations – mission accomplished!
If you’re having trouble imagining what Linux would look like without the involvement and support of these companies, let me help you out – just think about where open education is today.
Great reading all round. But my inner perverse imp cannot help but ask if with this post Dr. Wiley might have fallen off the wagon (scroll to the bottom)?
This is likely my last post for while, at least until David posts something again…
Given the vast reach of my blog, with a readership that extends well into double digits, I feel a certain sense of obligation to use the awesome power of this platform wisely. So allow me to link to Professor David Wiley’s announcement of a job opening with the Instructional Technology Department at Utah State University.
I have raved at length in the past about the calibre of faculty, staff and students at USU, and about the charms of Logan. Suffice it to say this will be a wonderful opportunity for a fortunate candidate.
So though I took the criticisms of Stephen Downes and others seriously, ultimately I concluded that the potential impact of the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education was too powerful for me to ignore. David Wiley has a number of good posts up lately with pointers to the huzzahs, the critiques, and the alternatives, and I would urge you to look them over and give serious thought to whether you care to add your name to the document.
David also has provided a couple web banners, for those of you who share my evident passion for advocacy via remote-hosted images — if only it had some javascript to slow down my page-load speeds even more!
Speaking of which, the Northern Voice banners have been available for some time, offering a number of options how to show your love for The Moose. As you may have noticed, I chose the biggest and most obtrusive option for my homepage…
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Jim and others have blogged this news, but kudos to the Library of Congress for putting more than 3000 images up on Flickr. Also interesting how they are inviting users to tag and add information to the images, as well as the designation of “No known copyright restrictions,” which sure beats the normal approach to orphan works.
What crazy logic — that the value of cultural assets is enhanced when people can see and even reuse them. And if nothing else, maybe people won’t think I’m quite so goofy when I suggest Flickr for small-scale image repository projects.
More information and background at the Library of Congress weblog…
As an admirer of the sadly defunct Stay Free! magazine, I was drawn to the recent blog post presenting the syllabus (and presumed student annotations) of their ongoing adult education lecture series, which looks like a nifty combination of pedagogy and performance art… (Can one aspire to a higher calling?)
Click on the image for a full size reproduction.
One note to the estimable professors: I like the idea of hosting the course on a MySpace page, but the resulting requirement to take out an account to read the detailed entries is unfortunate. I’ve taken out enough fake-and-quickly-forgotten MySpace accounts for a lifetime.
So Richard Baraniuk’s talk on the Open Education Revolution was as good as I expected. And Richard himself perpetuated a trend I have been delighted to notice in this field, which roughly stated is that the more impressive and more accomplished the person, the more easygoing and devoid of ego they tend to be…
I have followed the Connexions Project for some time, so I was mostly familiar with the components of Richard’s presentation. But two revelations jumped out at me:
* That Connexion’s robust digital-to-print conversion features combined with advances in print-on-demand technology have allowed Rice University Press to rise from the ashes — perhaps there is a future for University publishing houses that is at least borderline sustainable.
* A legitimate criticism of the open education movement is that it favours institution-centric practice. Richard shared the story of a Houston-based music teacher whose innovative methods for teaching music theory in a typical year might reach the 15 or 20 students she was able to work with in person. Through Connexions, she has been able to reach a genuinely vast audience (Richard cited a total of 7.2 million views). And apparently her work is incorporated into public education syllabi around the world, including some in Mongolia. To me, a story like that suggests the potential of open education might genuinely be “revolutionary”.
I recorded audio of the session, though it’s not especially good quality. There was also some professional recording of audio and video done, hopefully I will be able to upgrade what is here soon.
This is an 11 minute excerpt from the Q&A, in which we discussed the hard realities of getting adoption of open courseware in a higher ed setting:
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And here is the unedited audio of the session:
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So between the session and other conversations I’ve been having lately (as well as some welcome indications of support from higher-ups here at UBC), I was beginning to feel some new motivation to make another push to get some kind of open courseware project rolling.
Then, last night, I was doing a round of web-trolling and came across this article by one of my heroes, Canadian copyright maven Michael Geist. Geist notes the success of the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative (Stephen Downes queries the numbers being bandied about), and the global reach of the OCW Consortium (it’s worth checking out the comments on Geist’s blog) — then he tears into a notable gap:
Yet it is also a story in which Canada is largely absent. The sole Canadian participant in the Open Courseware consortium is Capilano College, a relatively small school with 6,700 students located in North Vancouver, British Columbia. The rest of Canadian higher education — Toronto, York, UBC, Western, Alberta, Queen’s, Ottawa, McGill, Dalhousie, Waterloo, and dozens more — are inexplicably missing in action.
Failure to lead
While collective agreements may restrict the ability to mandate participation, every Canadian university should be able to identify a handful of professors willing to freely post their course materials so that the 10-course minimum can be met. Indeed, it is an initiative in which everyone benefits — enhanced reputation for the participating professors, name recognition and student recruitment for the institutions, and new access to knowledge for Canadians from coast to coast.
Canadians pride themselves in being one of the world’s most connected countries; however, the failure to lead on issues such the Open Courseware consortium and open access to the results of Canadian research suggests that we are still struggling to identify how to fully leverage the benefits to education of new technology and the Internet. Many of Canada’s top universities may liken themselves to MIT, but the near-total absence of Canada from the Open Courseware consortium suggests that there is still much to learn.
To which I can only reply… “OUCH!”
As an aside, while it is wonderful that Capilano College is moving in this direction, a half hour of investigation and emailing made it clear that as of now the extent of their activities is some internal discussion, and a pilot eduCommons page that is hosted by Utah State’s COSL, with no courses or content as yet. If that’s the standard for inclusion in the OCW Consortium, UBC might fairly claim to have gotten there more than two years ago.
If that sounds snarky, it isn’t meant to, really. I know all too well that the hard work is identifying willing faculty and other community members, getting the policy (especially IP) questions cleared up, having some kind of technical infrastructure and support in place. And you need to simultaneously engage the grassroots and get buy-in from the upper reaches of the institution’s administration. There are so many chicken-and-egg dilemmas that planning discussions often resemble a stoner study group in a poorly moderated philosophy class…
Yet a confluence of factors has me feeling oddly motivated to stir things up. In the recent past, I’ve argued that getting stuff up on the open web with an open license was enough. But the discussions I’ve been having here have me thinking there might be value in a more formal and programmatic approach. And I find myself wondering what it would really take to scrape ten decent open online courses together… (I wish it was as simple as Geist suggests.)
So I’m going to be making proposals around campus, drawing on the resources available on the OCW Consortium site (any other resources I should know about?)…
More importantly, I intend to contact as wide a range of people as I can here to get a sense of interest in the on-campus community. So if you are at UBC, don’t be surprised if you get an email. (And don’t be afraid to contact me!) And as much as I love to deride Facebook activism, I might see how useful it is to set up a FB group to gather and inform interested parties.
Few things are more invigorating than embarking on an impossible task. Anybody else up for tilting at some windmills?
I must have had a serious brain cramp, as I’ve neglected to plug a talk on open education tomorrow by Richard Baraniuk. Richard has been a heavy hitter in this domain for some time, due to his leadership of the deeply cool Connexions project.
Details and registration for the talk are here:
Date: January 15, 2008
Time: 10:00 – 11:30 am
Location: Michael Smith Laboratories Lecture Theatre, Room 102, 2185 East Mall
A grassroots movement is sweeping through the academic world. The “open education movement” is based on a set of intuitions that are shared by a remarkably wide range of academics: that knowledge should be free and open to use and re-use; that collaboration should be easier, not harder; that people should receive credit and kudos for contributing to education and research; and that concepts and ideas are linked in unusual and surprising ways and not the simple linear forms that traditional media present. In this talk, I will overview the past, present, and future of the open education movement in the context of Connexions (cnx.org), which invites authors, educators, and learners worldwide to “create, rip, mix, and burn” textbooks, courses, and learning materials from a global open-access repository.
We had Richard here as a speaker shortly after I started at UBC, something like five years ago. He’s immensely knowledgeable, highly engaging, and a very strong speaker. Indeed, I’m pretty sure he is our first guest (in the education technology domain at least) who has delivered a TED talk.
This talk amply rewards the 18 minutes of time it takes to watch. I gotta say though, as much as I love discussions on the tensions between analog and digital media, I think Richard’s opening example of vinyl as an outdated technology is grievously misplaced. But that argument is for another post…
