This is one of the special times of the year when “us Christians” around the world pause for extra reflection on the incredible gift we’ve received from God in His Son Jesus Christ. Even if you aren’t Christian, I’d encourage you to take some time this weekend to “count your blessings.” There’s no feeling in the world like gratitude, and the world needs more people whose hearts are filled with thanks.
Happy Easter.
Before you start screaming that you’ve already written about this and I haven’t cited you, notice what I’m asking here. I’m giving a talk with the following abstract in a few weeks and am still doing research for the talk. If you have written something on the topic, let me know so I can be sure to include you. If you know of something interesting in this area that you didn’t write, please let me know anyway!
(1) Open educational resources such as MIT OpenCourseWare demonstrate that educational materials are increasingly becoming a free, ubiquitous infrastructure for teaching and learning. Leveraging free and open access to a wide range of high quality educational resources can allow the faculty member to drastically change their role in supporting learning. (2) The increasing connectivity of teachers and learners via email, SMS, instant messenger, Twitter, and other tools allows us to move beyond “groups” in our thinking of multi-person assignments to a broader, more loosely knit notion of networks. Large-scale, collaborative social networks challenge our ideas of academic honesty but are a simple fact of life that instructors can either fight against or leverage to better support learning. (3) Open educational resources and social networks point toward a future for higher education in which services traditionally consolidated within a single institution (e.g., providing content, providing learning support, providing assessments, providing degrees) are disaggregated and provided by a number of institutions that compete on quality of service and price for learner business.
(I’ve already found Terry’s excellent Networks Versus Groups in Higher Education.)
Simple wins. I certainly didn’t say it first. Of all the times I have said it, I probably said it best in my Openness, Localization, and the Future of Learning Objects talk at BCNET last year. It was then that I adopted Simple Gifts as the theme song of all my open education efforts.
Wired and then Scott reiterate. Found these via Stephen.
Note that the Apple and Google examples demonstrate that Simple Wins is a rule of the front end. No one would accuse the iPhone or Google search as being simplistic on the back end.