Hear ye, hear ye! The Open Ed 2008 presentation submission system is online. (A nod to the great folks at SFU who produce the Open Conference Systems software goes here.) Check out the OpenEd 2008 Call for Papers and submit your proposal! In addition to traditional presentations, we’ll also be accepting technical demonstrations - so even if you don’t have a paper to present, come show off your edupunk DIY PLE project. Submissions are due by June 30, 2008.
Our keynotes this year, all of whom will focus on issues of sustainability, include Teresa Malango from Magnatune (the CC-licensed music label), Gary Lopez from MITE, the National Repository of Online Courses, Hippocampus, and several other projects, and Wayne Mackintosh from the Commonwealth of Learning and Wikieducator. Each will talk about their unique - and successful - approach to sustaining open content projects.
I’m also extremely excited to announce that thanks to the generous support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, we are offering four scholarships to OpenEd 2008. The scholarships include complimentary full registration and four nights of hotel accommodations in Logan, plus up to $750 towards your travel! Details on how to apply are on the OpenEd 2008 Scholarship page.
Please spread the word about the Call for Papers and the Scholarships. Many thanks!
Several readers have asked or emailed about access to the Open High School of Utah’s charter application documents. They are now online for your reviewing and reusing pleasure!
http://openhighschool.org/documents/
The documents are licensed CC By 3.0. We sincerely hope that many of you will reuse the charter application documents to start your own OER charter schools!
Several of you have emailed with statements of support for the Open High School of Utah. Thank you for all the offers of help and the connections and introductions you’re making. Please keep them coming in!!
I especially appreciated this note from Jun in the Philippines:
You have just set a precedent that may be the answer to many of non-developed countries woes in education.
You just might have transformed education as we know it.
Let the “revolution” begin and spread!
This will be a huge amount of work and letters of support like this will keep us going! Thanks!
With extreme joy and happiness I can now announce that this past Friday (the 9th) the Utah Board of Education formally approved our request to create a new charter school to be called the Open High School of Utah. For those unfamiliar with how US charter schools work, a charter school is a publicly funded school with a specific emphasis - like a performing arts high school. OHSU will be a completely online school (or “virtual school” as they are sometimes called) that will use open educational resources exclusively.
Through partnerships we are building we hope to make the OHSU an “early college high school,” meaning that students will have the opportunity to earn an Associate’s degree at no extra cost at the same time they earn their high school diploma. Our pedagogical approach will be heavily influenced by service learning.
As you can imagine, a high school based on OERs has need of a variety of partnerships - especially partners who are also interested in locating / assembling / building an entire high school curriculum’s worth of OER content. There will be lots of opportunities for volunteers to contribute and become part of the OHSU community - finding appropriately licensed resources, assembling these in ways that conform with their various incompatible licenses (no small challenge!), creating new OERs to fill the gaps in what exists, aligning content structures to state and national standards, etc.
I’ll post more information as soon as I have it. If you have ideas re: partnerships please add them in the comments or email me directly at david.wiley@gmail.com.
Leigh Blackall reports that later this week Otago Polytechnic will become the second higher education institution to formally sign the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. Way to go!
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