This morning I sent the following email to the 2,253 subscribers to the Open Education Conference mailing list. I extend the same invitation to you. My apologies in advance for the length of this email, but I hope you’ll agree the subject warrants it. The work of the open education community is so important that we must leverage every resource available to better support student learning and success. The Open Education Conference is one of those resources. And it can be better. It needs to be better. How we can use the conference to its fullest potential in order to catalyze and facilitate more, better, and deeper learning for all students - particularly for those students who are the least likely to succeed without the work we are doing? ...

As you may have heard, my fellow rabble-rouser George Siemens and I are doing a MOOC on open education that launches later this month on edX. Before you ask, let me preemptively answer a few questions. Yes, this MOOC actually is open - all the content will be viewable outside the edX platform and downloadable under open licenses so as to be fully 5R-able, yes, you can fully participate in the course for free, and no, I don’t make any money should you choose to try for a Verified Certificate. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, George and I have a request. Would you be willing to make a 3 - 5 minute video sharing your perspectives and experiences regarding one or more of our weekly topics? We would love for our fellow course participants to hear a wide diversity of voices (rather than just suffering through ours all the time). The weekly topics are: ...

Reading through and pondering the reactions to what was apparently a wonderful ALTC keynote by Bonnie Stewart (UPDATE: here are her slides), I find myself reflecting on the ways my thinking about “open” is influenced by the ideas of negative liberty and positive liberty. This is certainly not the only lens through which I see open, but I do feel like it is a useful one. As I understand it, negative liberty refers to the absence of external obstacles, barriers, roadblocks, hinderances, or constraints that interfere with my ability to accomplish my desires. My negative liberty is maximized when there is nothing in the law, in society, or elsewhere outside of me that prevents me from exercising my agency in order to accomplish my desires. ...

I started to post this as a comment on Mike’s amazing essay Information Underload, but I’m going to put it here instead. Read Mike’s whole piece - it’s worth it. He writes: Endless thinkpieces have been written about the Netflix matching algorithm [including in education], but for many years that algorithm could only match you with the equivalent of the films in the Walmart bargain bin, because Netflix had a matching algorithm but nothing worth watching. (emphasis in original) ...

Last week I shared a little of my thinking about the problems inherent in the way people in the field talk about OER. Primary among those problems is our bewildering refusal to talk about the permissions necessary to engage in the 5R activities. These permissions are a critical part of the definition of what it means for a learning resource to be open. Second among the problems I discussed is our seeming inability to be clear about OER being free (the other critical part of the definition of what it means for a learning resource to be open), while services provided in conjunction with OER might cost money. ...

In a recent webinar about OER, organized by one of the major textbook publishers, there was a lot of conversation about whether OER are “free” or “affordable.” This conversation was problematic in two ways. Before I begin though, just to be clear, allow me to reaffirm that OER are free, plain and simple, full stop, period. That is literally part of the definition of OER. OER = free + permissions. ...

This is just a quick note to say that if you’re following the work being done on JSON feeds (as a compliment to - or potential replacement for - RSS), I’ve activated JSON feeds on opencontent.org. If you want to try reading Iterating Toward Openness that way, you can access this new feed at https://opencontent.org/feed/json.

Today and tomorrow I’m at the EdTech Efficacy Research Academic Symposium in Washington, DC. The conversations here have been wonderful and have reminded me of something… For many years, several friends and I have argued about the following question: After accounting for all other differences - differences in a student’s age, race, gender, income, and prior academic success; differences in school environments; differences in teachers; differences in support available from friends, family, and other out-of-school sources; &c. - what is the theoretical upper limit on the impact a specific textbook, digital learning platform, or other edtech product can have on educational measures we care about (e.g., final grade, completion rate, time to graduation, satisfaction, etc.)? ...

Over the last several weeks there has been an incredible amount of writing about open pedagogy and open educational practices (samples collected here by Maha). There have been dozens of blog posts. Countless tweets. There was a well-attended (and well-viewed) conversation via Google Hangout. At the Hewlett OER Meeting last week over a dozen people spent another hour talking about the issue during the unconference time. There were additional conversations on the topic during walks through the incredibly beautiful countryside outside Toronto. I had particularly helpful talks with John Hilton and Rajiv Jhangiani - but don’t blame them if you don’t like what you read below. ...

Some random thoughts emerging in my mind as a result of yesterday’s wonderful conversation on “open pedagogy.” Don’t work too hard to figure out how they’re supposed to connect up. What we do with tools and resources is more important than the tools and resources themselves. However, without tools and resources there is precious little we can do. Many (e.g., Vygotsky, Leont’ev, Wertsch) have argued persuasively that learning is mediated. Some have argued (again, I think persuasively) that the primary tool that mediates learning is language. Whether learning is being supported through conversation, lecture, argument, video, adaptive courseware, plain old textbook, or Google Hangout, words are absolutely critical to supporting learning. ...