Author Archives: david

About david

http://davidwiley.prg/

Senior Fellow for Open Education

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I’m humbled and very excited to announce that, as of today, I am the Senior Fellow for Open Education at the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, also known as Digital Promise. I’ll post more detail on exactly what this means later this week. FAQ: No, I’m not leaving BYU; I’ll be acting in this role in addition to my responsibilities at BYU.

In the meantime, here’s the SL Tribune story and the text of the article from the McKay School News:

Dr. David Wiley, an associate professor in the Department of Instructional Psychology & Technology at Brigham Young University, today begins an appointment as Senior Fellow for Open Education with Digital Promise, a new national center created by Congress to research, develop, and scale up technologies that can transform the way teachers teach and students learn. Wiley will advise the center as it develops policy recommendations through a series of white papers and works to establish a broader Digital Promise Fellows program.

In addition to his own teaching and research, Wiley serves as Associate Director for Research in the Center for the Improvement of Teacher Education and Schooling, housed in the BYU McKay School of Education, and as director of the open education research group. He has previously held visiting or fellowship positions at prestigious institutions including the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, the Open University of the UK, and the Open University of the Netherlands.

Digital Promise Executive Director Adam Frankel commented on Wiley’s appointment, “I’m incredibly excited about David’s appointment as a Digital Promise Senior Fellow for Open Education. David is one of America’s most innovative thinkers on the future of learning. His cutting-edge work is helping America find ways of cutting costs while delivering a world-class education to all our students. Harnessing the promise of technology to drive better results is David’s trademark, and it’s what Digital Promise is all about.”

Wiley has specific goals for his work, most of which will focus on the roles of federal and state education agencies in solving sector-wide problems in education. “I’ll be working to identify what these agencies can do to increase and accelerate the development and distribution of highly effective educational resources, particularly those with open licenses, thereby reducing costs.” Wiley added, “As a nation we have to think about education more expansively, including both formal and informal learning. Leveraging technology is one of the key ways to enable this enlarged thinking.”

McKay School Dean K. Richard Young remarked, “David’s commitment to the improvement of teaching and learning, coupled with his passion to insure access to knowledge for all, will benefit Digital Promise as well as continuing to benefit the McKay School of Education at BYU.” Wiley agrees, saying his work for Digital Promise will be closely related to what he has previously accomplished at the McKay School. “My research at BYU focuses on issues of affordability and effectiveness, through exploring open licenses and the new pedagogical and financial opportunities these licenses afford.”

Congress authorized Digital Promise, formally titled the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, in 2008. Digital Promise aims to support research about learning technologies similar to ways that the National Institutes of Health support health research and the Department of Energy supports energy research. Digital Promise is bringing schools, entrepreneurs, and researchers together to capture the learning opportunities of the 21st century.

For more information, please contact David Wiley at 801-8229211 or David_Wiley@byu.edu or Digital Promise Executive Director Adam Frankel at 202-833-7433 or adam@digitalpromise.org.

Kicking Away the Ladder

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Chomsky absolutely nails the explanation of why “Buy One, Get One” does not generally exist with regard to public access to publicly-funded innovation, and gives us another awesome metaphor-weapon in the battle against bad IP policy.

… Friedrich List, famous German political economist in the 19th century, who was actually borrowing from Andrew Hamilton, called it “kicking away the ladder.” First you use state power and violence to develop, then you kick away those procedures so that other people can’t do it….

Project Management for Instructional Designers

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What did you do for finals week this year? Students in our IPT 682: Project Management class put the finishing touches on their new online textbook, Project Management for Instructional Designers. This is the first large scale, multi-person REVISE / REMIX project I’ve had the pleasure of working on. From the Introduction:

This book is an adaptation of Project Management from Simple to Complex written by Russell Darnall and John Preston and generously published under an open license by Flat World Knowledge. The book you are now reading is a work in progress. If you are interested in contributing to this version of the book, please contact David Wiley at Brigham Young University.

So how did the REVISE / REMIX work? Students in IPT 682 took the text of the Flat World Knowledge book as their starting point. Then they:

  • Tore out the examples in the book, which were previously about international business situations, and replaced them with instructional design examples,
  • Tore out the photos from the book, which were previously (c) and used by permission, and replaced them with openly licensed and properly attributed photos (mainly from Flickr),
  • Shot three video interviews with practicing instructional design project managers and cut these up into topical pieces which now appear inline at the beginning of each chapter, and
  • Created interactive, mastery-check assessments (and the platform to deliver them!) and embedded these directly at the end of each section of the book. Small icons in the table of contents turn green when you’ve passed the mastery checks.

Big kudos to the IPT 682 students! This is awesome work they can be very proud of. Please consider adopting this book for your class and / or submitting improvements and corrections.