pragmatism over zeal
There’s a hilarious spoof of the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education on the iCommons listserv. Gave me a good laugh, and definitely worth a read.
I say hilarious, because the spoof really is funny. However, the spoof is also deeply disappointing because its subtext is a completely irrational, anti-sustainability mindset that is the single biggest threat to the success of the open education movement. Continue reading ‘Cape Town Declaration Spoof Both Funny and Depressing’
Today is the launch of the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education! There’s already been lots of commentary; I’ve blogged some of it before. (e.g., Stephen is among the critics.) I expect there will be lots more commentary now that the Declaration has actually launched. I’ll be doing my best to blog it all over the next several months.
If you haven’t signed the declaration yet please do so! You can encourage others with this banner:
<a href="http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/" title="Open Education - Cape Town Declaration"><img src="http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i291/opencontent/support-capetown.png" alt="Open Education - Cape Town Declaration" align="right" border="0" />
If the banner is too big for your taste you can also use this little button. <a href="http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/" title="Cape Town Declaration on Open Education Button"><img src="http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i291/opencontent/cape-town-button.png" alt="Cape Town Declaration on Open Education Button" align="right" border="0" /></a>
Next Monday is the beginning of the Introduction to Open Education course! Hurray! We already have over 20 participants from major US instructional technology programs (Georgia, Indiana, George Mason, South Florida) and folks from six countries outside the US signed up to participate. I suppose the USU participants (my school) are all waiting for next week to sign up… =)
I’ve had someone (who isn’t a university student, and therefore doesn’t need or want credits) ask about receiving a certificate from the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning for successful completion of the experience. So here is what I’m going to do (sorry about the detail, but if you ever want to do this at your university the detail may come in handy):
1. If we call this a “non-credit workshop with a credit option,” then everything works well policy-wise / procedure-wise here at USU. And since the majority of the folks who are participating are not doing it for credit, this makes sense.
2. It turns out that the Center can charge as much or as little as it likes for “non-credit workshops” where credit is not being awarded.
3. Therefore, if you don’t need university credits but would like a certificate at the end of the experience saying that you “successfully completed” the workshop, I will invite you to make a $50 donation to the Center. If you do the specified work and successfully complete the course, you’ll then get an official certificate from the Center signed by me saying that you successfully completed the Introduction to Open Education workshop.
4. HOWEVER, if you would like the certificate but can’t afford the $50 donation, just email me to let me know you want to earn the certificate, and I’ll be happy to send you one at the end of the class for free (assuming you do all the work).
I’m really looking forward to the class! See you all next week!
There’s a fascinating interview on Spiegel with James Shikwati, an “African economics expert,” in which he explains how foreign aid is preventing many African nations from rising out of poverty and the host of other problems they face. “If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid…. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.”
What does this attitude mean for people working in open educational resources?
Toru Iiyoshi recently made a great post about the main tenet of open education. Here are a few of my responses:
Continue reading ‘Toru on “the main tenet of open education”’
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