Via eSchoolNews comes the exciting news that Florida public schools have added a CC-licensed resource to their approved list of curricular materials:
Tired of investing in expensive textbooks and proprietary software programs, Florida education officials are looking to an open online-learning platform to teach young students basic reading skills… Florida has adopted FreeReading.net on its short list of K-3 supplemental reading programs that schools may use state instructional money to purchase for the 2008-09 school year. This is the first open instructional program to be approved through an official state adoption, officials said.
The story also covers the Cape Town Declaration and the “open education movement” briefly. Hooray for Florida!
Alessandro blogged tonight about the same frustration many of us (myself included) are feeling with regard to the Intro to Open Ed course. Alessandro’s frustrated that I haven’t been providing as much feedback as might be desired. I have to agree. With about 60 students following the course, I could easily spend all day every day responding to what you are all writing and still not keep up. There is really amazing thinking and writing happening “out there,” and I love reading it and engaging with it. As you may guess, though, I’m making sure to give feedback and additional prompts to the students who are registered for credit first, and then reading as much of the rest of your work when I can, and commenting when possible.
Continue reading ‘OpenEd Week “X”’
I love Stephen Downes.
Even though I can’t understand what he’s been saying to me for the last year, he still pushes me around mentally and makes me think and write. You simply have to love someone who does that for you. Commenting on Jennifer’s blog, Stephen asks: Continue reading ‘Misunderstanding Stephen’
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I’m at an incredible meeting co-sponsored by Shuttleworth, Hewlett, and OSI looking at possibly producing a declaration on open education. For the first session in the morning, participants listed all the open education projects we are working on. You can see the cards we posted on the windows, or the list of projects as we transcribed it into the wiki. We then broke into small groups and analyzed the data from the cards. My group decided to treat each card as if it were a webpage we were tagging in delicious. You can see the resulting collection of tags as a list of projects as we transcribed it into the wiki. We then broke into small groups and analyzed the data from the cards. My group decided to treat each card as if it were a webpage we were tagging in delicious. You can see the resulting collection of tags as a tag cloud, a pie chart, and a bar chart. These data visualizations are an interesting commentary on where the open education movement is spending its efforts. We then gathered back together and reported the work of our small groups.
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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!
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