Monthly Archive for June, 2008

OpenEd 2008 Paper Submission Ends Today!

Published
by
david
on June 30, 2008
in open content
. 1 Comment

If you have an idea, project, paper, or any other form of activity (believe me, we’re open to nontraditional!) you’ve been considering submitting to the Open Education Conference 2008, today is the day! Head over to http://cosl.usu.edu/events/opened2008/call-for-papers and submit today!

We’re looking forward to another awesome conference this year. As Brian Lamb recently gushed:

The conference is a fantastic mix of academic and practical topics, where open source technology, open content, sustainable models, and net culture mix into a delicious and sneaky subversive brew. And though Logan can seem a bit remote for travelers, the drive through the canyons of Utah to get there is stunningly beautiful, and the city itself has many charms - I’ve come to think of it as one of my adopted homes. Expect the COSL folks to run a conference that is logistically flawless, yet relaxed, friendly and fun.

Remember that 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.

Hoping to see you there!

Moving to BYU

Published
by
david
on June 13, 2008
in open content
. 21 Comments

It is with mixed emotion (but certainly a huge amount of excitement!) that I write today to tell you that I have accepted a position at Brigham Young University. I’ll be making the transition over the summer and begin teaching at BYU in the fall.

I remain as committed as ever to pursuing my work of increasing access to educational opportunity, and believe that there will be many wonderful opportunities at BYU in this regard. As you know, I am devoting much of my time right now to the Open High School of Utah, which I believe will be a shining example to the world of what the future of open education will be like.

Thank you all for your continued support, and I hope to see many of you soon.

Accreditation and the Catholic Church

Published
by
david
on June 11, 2008
in open content
. 6 Comments

Had a fabulous time presenting virtually for Brian Lamb today at the UBC Town Hall today. In response to one of the questions that was asked at the end of the session, I had a thought - perhaps a rare occurrence. It was a memory, actually, of a blog post I wrote almost 10 years ago as a graduate student. The thought was basically this:

Educational reform is much like religious reform, and our openness movement and desires to innovate in higher education are much like the Reformation. When the Church was the prevailing power, it took Luther a significant amount of courage to stand up, nail a list of issues to the door, and say “Go ahead and excommunicate me. I’ve tried reforming from within with no success. You leave me no choice but to leave and try again on my own.”

In today’s higher education environment, accreditation bodies are very much like the Catholic Church of old. They exercise supreme power and authority of our institutions, and should our accrediting body choose to revoke our accreditation, our universities would go straight to the institutional equivalent of Hell.

This control over our schools is both ambient and ubiquitous - everywhere and unseen - much like the Church’s domination used to be. And as long as our institutions have to conform to the wishes of the accrediting bodies, no large-scale innovation or reformation can happen. (As an exercise, try to imagine an accredited institution of higher education that looks meaningfully different from any other.) We need an institution with the courage to nail its list of issues on the door of the accrediting bodies and say “Go ahead and excommunicate me (aka revoke my accreditation). I’ve tried reforming from within with no success. You leave me no choice but to leave and try again on my own.”

Of course there are a number of smaller start-up colleges that have a “who cares” attitude toward accrediting bodies, but these folks were anathema to begin with - so no message is really being sent. We need a “member of the Church” - an accredited institution - to stand up and reject the demands of the accreditors that prevent us from really innovating. Perhaps then we can start to clear out the kludge that is preventing higher education from trying new things and begin keeping up with our quick-paced business, government, and personal lives.

Calculating Your EduCarbon Footprint

Published
by
david
on June 6, 2008
in open content
. 4 Comments

As long as we’re enjoying this recent era of new word creation (c.f. “edupunk“), I’ll throw out the idea of an “EduCarbon Footprint.” Marie Duncan, a doctoral student of mine, is currently finishing a study of the structure of reuse with the Connexions repository. While reading her discussion of why more people don’t reuse existing, openly-licensed material, it made me think ‘we need a measure, like your carbon footprint, of how much you reuse existing educational materials.’ What would such a measure look like? A ratio of how much you reuse to how much you create? A ratio of the amount of open resources you use to closed resources? Would it be useful to have a measure like this? Surely you can think of a better name? And lastly, someone else has probably already proposed this - who was it?