I’m privileged to be guest blogging for the Chronicle of Higher Education during the month of July. My third post has just gone up, and it occurs to me I haven’t shared those fun bits here. Here are the links to my Chronicle posts to date:
Monthly Archive for July, 2009
Early Bird Registration ends July 20th!
This summer an impressive cross-section of innovative and passionate educators from around the world will be coming to Vancouver for the Sixth Annual Open Education Conference, *August 12-14th, at UBC’s downtown Robson Square campus*. If you have an interest in opening up your practice in terms of resources, pedagogy, or public outreach, this event represents an opportunity to learn with some of the most accomplished figures in the field in an informal and friendly environment.
Keynote speakers are Catherine Ngugi of OER Africa, Ken Freedman of WFMU and the Free Music Archive, and Dr. Fred Mulder of the Open Universiteit Nederland and his country’s National Initiative on Lifelong Learning.
The full three day program has been posted online at http://openedconference.org/program. Speakers include:
• Ahrash Bissell, Jane Park, & Alex Kozak, Lila Bailey: Creative Commons – ccLearn
• Lindsey Weeramuni, Brandon Muramatsu: MIT OpenCourseWare
• Joel Thierstein: Connexions
• Alan Levine: The New Media Consortium
• Bryan Alexander: NITLE
• Gardner Campbell: Baylor University
• Jim Groom: University of Mary Washington
• J. Philipp Schmidt: University of the Western Cape, Peer 2 Peer University
• Mara Hancock: Opencast, University of California, Berkeley
• Diego Leal: Ministry of Education – Republic of Colombia
• D’Arcy Norman: University of Calgary
• Jon Mott: Brigham Young University
• Sheila MacNeill: (JCIS CETIS)
• Leigh Blackall: Otago Polytechnic New Zealand
• Christopher J. Mackie: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
• Jutta Treviranus: Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto
• Dave Cormier: Edactive Technologies
In addition, there will be a pre-conference full-day dialogue August 11th on the future of open education between Stephen Downes and David Wiley. And an intimate roundtable “Conversation on Policy: Access, Quality, and Credentialing” chaired by George Siemens and Rory McGreal.
To register for the Open Education Conference, please visit the conference website at http://openedconference.org/register.
For a year now I’ve been running the McKay School of Education’s OCW pilot on WPMU. However, I’ve never blogged exactly how I’ve got it setup or how we’re using it.
Last summer, in preparation for the pilot, I set up WPMU 2.7 with the following plugins installed across the site:
- PageMash – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pagemash/
Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.- Search Everything – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-everything/
This plugin increases the ability of the default WP search (including pages, tags, etc.).- tags4page – http://www.michelem.org/wordpress-plugin-tags4page/
This plugin allows you to tag pages (posts can already be tagged).- WPLicense – http://wiki.creativecommons.org/WpLicense
WpLicense is a plugin for WordPress which allows users to select a Creative Commons license for their blog and content.- WP Pages Only – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pages-only/
This plugin simply changes the default “Write” and “Manage” links in admin to go to pages instead of posts.
Just these few plugins make WPMU quite usable as a no-frills OCW platform. Obviously, this setup lacks the full functionality of something like eduCommons, but you can also migrate from version to version in seconds with a single Subversion command, and we know that this platform scales to tens of millions of pageviews per day (e.g., wordpress.com).
IPT 287 does a number of other interesting things with other plugins, like syndicating all student work into the OCW site using FeedWordPress. Charles also utilized the blog functionality of WPMU to do live announcements, etc., on the site – actually teaching his course off the OCW site. This is another part of the beauty of WPMU – per course functionality.
It’s summer again, which means it’s time for open.byu.edu’s WPMU install to get an upgrade to 2.8 and for me to look for additional plugins and bits of functionality that any self-respecting OCW platform should have. We’ll also be growing the scope of our pilot this year (after doing only two courses last year). I’ve already started chatting with the good Reverend about some of the additional functionality we’re going to need as our pilot expands in scope… But I’d love your thoughts, too. What do you think as WPMU as an OCW platform? What functionality is WPMU with above plugins missing that it desperately needs? Are there existing plugins that provide that functionality?
You are completely replaceable, a cog in the machine, a brick in the wall. There is nothing that meaningfully differentiates you from anyone else. Functionally, you are hot-swappable for any other person. All “individual differences” are meaningless. There is nothing special or unique about you. You are a clone.
This is the message of “what works” style educational research. It tells us that, if you are a middle school student learning math, you are just like every other middle school student learning math. If you are a 2nd grader learning to read English, you are just like every other 2nd grader learning to read English as far as educational research knows or cares. Because well-designed and well-implemented randomized controlled trials discover methods that “work.” For everyone. Period. That’s the entire point of having a “trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education” – if we didn’t have methods that work universally, we wouldn’t be real scientists. Each individual student is just another tiny, indistinguishable, interchangeable part of the universe over which proven methods “work.” Personal relationships with students are oxymoronic because all students are the same, and besides, personal relationships don’t scale and are superficial to learning.
If this is really the way we’re encouraging educators to think about students, is it really a wonder that they hate school and apparently aren’t learning as much as their peers around the world?
With two months of data in the door, the numbers keep getting better and better for our pilot at BYU Independent Study OCW. To date 7559 people have visited BYU IS OCW, and 232 of those people have enrolled in at least one course (they may have enrolled in more than one course, but we don’t have that data yet). That’s a conversion rate of just over 3%! Things continue to look very sustainable…
