Tag Archives: research

Archive of My Published Articles

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Since my department at BYU has committed itself to open access publishing I’ve been able to get serious about putting my published writing in the university’s institutional repository called ScholarsArchive. So far I have 12 pieces in the collection, which are guaranteed to stay at these URLs for “a very long time” since the library is curating the repository. I’m happy as a clam that these pieces have permanent homes and that these pieces are freely available for the general public.

If you haven’t seen the published writing I’ve been doing (much of it with students) in the last few years, the majority of it is gathered on the David Wiley page in BYU’s ScholarsArchive. The articles include:

  • Openness, Dynamic Specialization, and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education
  • Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network
  • The Four R’s of Openness and ALMS Analysis: Frameworks for Open Educational Resources
  • The Open High School of Utah: Openness, Disaggregation, and the Future of Schools
  • Psychologism and American Instructional Technology
  • Open Source, Openness, and Higher Education
  • Open Educational Resources: Enabling universal education
  • Overcoming the Limitations of Learning Objects
  • Collecting, Organizing, and Managing Resources for Teaching Educational Games the Wiki Way
  • The Creation and Use of Open Educational Resources in Christian Higher Education
  • A Unified Design Framework for Learning Objects and Educational Discourse
  • Using Weblogs in Scholarship and Teaching

(PS. The system the library is using does not currently produce RSS feeds, so I’ve hacked together a Yahoo Pipe to produce a barebones RSS feed. The feed simply gives the names of all the articles on the site with a link to the main page. Hopefully a future update will make it easier to syndicate this information here and elsewhere.)

Johansen Dissertation on Sustainability of OCW Available

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Newly minted Dr. Justin Johansen’s dissertation study, The Impact Of Opencourseware On Paid Enrollment In Distance Learning Courses, is now available from BYU’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) archive.

This dissertation is the first piece of empirical work I am aware of that demonstrates clearly that a distance learning program can simultaneously (1) provide a significant public good by publishing opencourseware and (2) be revenue positive while doing it. In other words, Justin’s study not only demonstrates that it is possible to publish opencourseware without requesting donations from users or foundations, it goes further and demonstrates that it is possible to make money publishing opencourseware. And if you can make money publishing opencourseware, you can continue publishing opencourseware for a very long time. This capacity is also known as sustainability.

Congratulations to Dr. Johansen!

P.S. John Hilton will be defending his dissertation, which applies a similar methodology to examine the impact of giving away free e-books on the sales of printed books, February 11!

Mellon Foundation “Merges” RIT Program

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I received a communication from the Mellon Foundation today announcing that they’re “merging” the Research in Information Technology Program (RIT) with their Scholarly Communications Program, and that Ira and Chris are both leaving the Mellon Foundation. I won’t attempt to second guess why the restructuring is happening. From the email:

The Foundation is making a number of organizational changes designed to consolidate resources and concentrate them more effectively on the Foundation’s central objectives in support of its five core program areas: the liberal arts and humanistic scholarship in higher education, scholarly communications, museums and art conservation, performing arts, and conservation and the environment. As part of these changes, the Research in Information Technology Program (RIT) will be merged into the Scholarly Communications program and cease to exist as a standalone grantmaking program of the Mellon Foundation, effective January 4, 2010. The Scholarly Communications program, which will be renamed so as to indicate, explicitly, that technology-based grantmaking is part of its mandate, will assume responsibility for managing existing RIT grants and the planning of future grant initiatives that emphasize the development of information technologies in support of the Foundation’s core focus. As this merger occurs, my colleagues, Ira Fuchs, who founded the RIT program at the Foundation in 2000, and Christopher Mackie, will both be leaving the Foundation.

The RIT Program at Mellon has been a major funder of open source / open education projects we know and care about, like Zotero, Sakai, Kuali, and Folksemantic. When Hewlett funded content development in open education, Mellon funded software development for open education. Their combined efforts have had a huge, positive impact on the field. With Mike and Cathy both leaving Hewlett last year, and now Ira and Chris leaving Mellon, the field really feels like it’s in transition…

A hearty “God bless” to Ira and Chris as they set out on new adventures.