Published on
February 24, 2006 in
Uncategorized.
Tags: mashups.
Stephen comments on my recent As We May Interact?:
Tools like Flickr, Friendster and Technorati each try to become, if you will, a destination for people, to aggregate as many users as they can. We need to focus less on these big centres and more on how even unpopular tools can be mashed up and aggregated. There needs to be, if you will, a long tail of Web 2.0 tools – but nobody knows how to do that yet.
I think we may know how to mashup “even unpopular tools,” depending on what one means by mashup. By mashup, I mean utilizing a wide range of individual tools (like flickr, delicious, technorati, etc.) and aggregating the results of those uses into a collection of data that I can do new things with. If this is what we mean by mashup, I think that RSS and our imaginations give us most of the answers we need.
I also think we have to be careful in how we approach the decentralization issue in this next generation of tools. Let’s not forget what Ritter taught us: if we fully distribute data and go searching around for it whenever we need it, it doesn’t take that many users before the query traffic eats up all available bandwidth – never mind transferring any of the data you actually were looking for. We need an approach that distributes specialized data-creation functionality across individual tools, and centrally aggregates the results of those activities for convenient, synergistic use via a variety of other tools.
I know this reads more like stram of consciousness than something well organized. But I had to dump something out here… it’s getting cramped inside my brain.
Continue reading ‘As We May Interact?’
A new blog on the block from COSL’s own John Dehlin. The blog follows open education news and hosts the Open Up! podcast, which so far has interviewed me, Steve Carson from MIT, and Stephen Downes. There will be several of us posting from time to time, so come check it out! – http://cosl.usu.edu/openup/ (thanks D’Arcy for reminding me to include the link!!!)
I pulled these paragraphs from my Commission testimony in the interest of time and not blurring my central message (higher education needs to stay in step with society). I submitted this recommendation to the Commission separately, and thought you might enjoy it. I would appreciate comments / thoughts:
Affordability. Part of the rising cost of higher education for students is the ever-increasing cost of textbooks – textbooks can add as much as $1000 per year to the cost of college. The National Association of College Bookstores says prices of college textbooks have risen nearly 40 percent in the past five years. In a survey of textbooks by the California Student Public Interest Research Group, new editions of textbooks cost 58 percent more than previous versions, with an average cost of over $100 per book. (Crane, 2004; Pressler, 2004). The impact of these costs is especially severe on low-income students. According to the General Accounting Office, the costs of textbooks represents 26 percent of the cost of tuition and fees at public four year schools, and almost a full three quarters of the cost of tuition and fees at 2 year public schools where low-income students are more likely to enroll (Bershears, 2005).
Frankly, the textbook situation is wreaking havoc on teaching and learning practices on our campuses, with as many as 43 percent of students foregoing the purchase of required textbooks due to financial considerations (Crane, 2004). When less than three in five students in a class have the materials they need to support their learning, there must be an acute impact on educational effectiveness.
While efforts like the OpenCourseWares are making great strides in providing curriculum materials in an open way, the development of open textbooks that could be voluntarily adopted by university faculty has been very slow to occur.
Recommendation: The Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, the NIH, and other entities with a vested interest should create competitive grant programs for the creation of open access textbooks for high enrolling courses and other classes in topics of national interest. Digital copies of these texts should be licensed with an open access license such as a Creative Commons license or simply placed in the public domain. Local copy stores (e.g., Kinko’s) or online print-on-demand publishers (e.g., Lulu.com) can print and bind the books if a teacher or students desires. The competitive nature of the grants will insure a high quality of content and great degree of innovativeness in accompanying supplementary materials (like simulations or interactive tutors).
This is the kind of “open infrastructure” for teaching and learning that would greatly speed the pace of teaching and learning innovation.
A couple of quick links to folks covering the Commission meeting where I got to testify last week:
I think they liked it! I hope there is a positive impact…
