pragmatism over zeal
Lots going around late today about Adam Bosworth’s closing keyonte (links to audio) at the MySQL conference. I enjoyed Ryan Tomayko’s writeup most, especially this deceivingly simple line:
Systems that were designed through observation of the web and/or in adherence to the core principles of the web must be more suitable to the web than those that were not.
This recognition will either make or break the entire open education movement, including eduCommons and the OpenCourseWares.
With our fourth child about to be born (literally any day now), yesterday I received word from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that our most recent grant proposal has been formally approved. This will provide us with 18 months time more in which to evangelize open education, support universities as they start OpenCourseWare initiatives with our eduCommons software, training, and evangelsim support, make publishing open educational resources easier by integrating and improving our OLS and eduCommons tools, and migrate USU OCW from our research center into the university’s Faculty Assistance Center for Teaching.
Mike, Cathy, and Pheonix from the Foundation are really people of vision, and it is constantly amazing to me that there are Foundations with the means, and people with the vision, that are willing to support work of this type. I’m extremely grateful for their support, and I hope my team and I can live up to the trust this funding represents.
It’s that time of year again! Last year’s Open Education Conference at USU was described by several as “the best conference I ever attended.” This year’s conference should be even better. Keynotes this year include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information) and Yochai Benkler (Coase’s Penguin).
The Call for Papers is available now. Please submit something! General information on the conference, including a Flyer and Presentation Slide you can use to help us advertise, is available at http://cosl.usu.edu/conference/.
I love Stephen. I really do. He pushes my thinking. In a recent comment he has got me thinking about how hard it is to provide help (or, by extension, to educate someone) in a morally appropriate manner. Below I pull out several quotes from his comments on my previous post and respond. It’s moderately long, but in the end I believe I find that help is not so hard to give and that education is not a dirty word.
Continue reading ‘The (im)Possibility of Help and Education’
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