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I have posted the first draft of the syllabus for my fall course, called Introduction to Open Education. I would absolutely love your feedback on important literature I’ve missed (especially your own papers!), topics that you think deserve their own dedicated week’s worth of time, etc. Feel free to either edit the syllabus directly or to use the discussion tab at the top of the page.
I’m also very happy to say that this class will be completely online, run completely in the open, and is welcome to all comers. If you would like to take the course for credit, just sign up for an independent study at your university and find a supervising faculty member to whom I can send a grade at the end of term. Be sure to contact me directly to let me know you’re taking the course for credit and send contact info for your supervising faculty member. Then add your info to the syllabus as directed (Name :: School :: Email :: Blog) so the rest of us can find you.
If you don’t need credit but would still like to participate in the course, I’d also love to have you! Please just go ahead and add yourself to the syllabus.
I’m hoping this will be an extremely international (though sadly, primarily English) experience for all of us.
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Preparing for my out-of-body presentation in Taiwan this week (I’m at home sick - grrr), I kept thinking about the OER space until I actually started visualizing it as a kind of outer space, with little OER bits floating around aimlessly. It was pretty fun to think about until I realized that the primoridal OER soup, the “OER Nebula” is actually being pulled in several directions by several different sources of gravity:
It kind of depressed me thinking the biggest centers of gravity in this space might be licenses. If nothing changes in the space, then billions of internet years from now (in 18 Earth months or so), the space might end up looking like this:
As long as these licenses stay incompatible, interstellar travel between the different worlds will be about the best we can hope for in terms of our remixes. Is this really what we’re doomed to? I think counting on the different licensing bodies to come to harmonization is all but a lost cause (please prove me wrong!). Is it possible to create a stronger center of gravity than the licenses, something that could pull the OERs toward a common place where remixing and sharing the results could be simple and legal?
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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?
No, this isn’t another tired post complaining that we should think of all “consumers” as also being “producers.” Of course we should.
This is a post about a much more subtle problem with the way we’re thinking, that I am increasingly convinced is putting the field of open educational resources (OER) at risk. Continue reading ‘OERs, Producers, Consumers, and Reuse’
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Lately I’ve been talking a lot with Bekir Gur (one of my absolutely excellent PhD students) about open education in the context of his dissertation writing. For his dissertation he’s taking a critical view of the field of instructional technology and, in the context of several reviews that range from the dominance of psychologism in the field to the the field’s obsession with objectification (remember the IEEE LOM documents saying people are learning objects?), he is arriving at an interesting conclusion: open education, thoughtfully practiced, is one solution to many of the ills currently plaguing the field of instructional technology. Reading his drafts and talking with him has prompted a few interesting thoughts… Continue reading ‘Thoughts Prompted by Bekir’
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