The tl;dr. In many contexts - like open content, open educational resources, open source software, open access, and open data - “open” means “free plus permissions.” But when modifying nouns that aren’t copyrightable - for example, in contexts like “open pedagogy” or “open educational practices” - open necessarily means something else. There are significant costs when we aren’t clear about what we mean by open in different contexts. A dozen or more years ago I was sitting in a meeting at MIT. There were fifteen or so people from around the world in the room and we were talking about open courseware. At some point the conversation turned to copyright and the incredible amount of time, effort, and resources it takes to review and clear all the material you want to share openly. A participant from China smiled broadly and said something along the lines of “That’s one of the great things about doing this work in China - you don’t have to worry about copyright! Nobody over there cares.” We all laughed appreciatively at his caricaturization of his own culture. As our laughter died down he added emphatically, over a flat stare, “I’m serious. We don’t even think about it.” Our laughter turned to awkward chuckling as we struggled to change the subject. ...

Mary and Amanda wrote a great post yesterday about BCCampus’ upcoming plans around open pedagogy. It reminded me that I meant to post the notes I developed for my workshop on open pedagogy at the Maricopa Community Colleges last week. Here’s my outline for the conversation we had there. (Yes, I know it’s outline-y and not completely fleshed out, but hopefully there’s enough here to be valuable.) I’m thinking quite hard about this topic these days. ...

I have a chapter about open educational resources that will be appearing in a book on trends and issues in instructional design and technology later this year. The chapter will be openly licensed and I’ll publish it here in full after it appears in the book. But Phil’s great post today about the price difference between digital and print textbook rentals has me wanting to post the chapter’s Summary of Key Principles. So here it is (with some links added to improve readability): ...

One of the reasons faculty can be slow to switch from commercial textbooks to OER is a perceived lack of open supplemental materials like powerpoint presentations, lab books, and test banks. There are certainly some disciplines in which this is a challenge (I’ll discuss how we’re changing that below). But let’s think for a moment about what that means: 1. A faculty member reviews a collection of OER (perhaps an open textbook) and feels like the collection would be an acceptable substitute for the commercial textbook they currently require students to purchase. ...

Several years ago I was speaking about OER at a conference in Virginia. There was a great feeling in the room, and though I hadn’t planned to speak about the topic, I felt prompted to end my remarks by stating that enough OER now existed that an entire degree program could be run on OER. One institution, somewhere, would get to be the first in the world to create an all-OER pathway through a degree program, and I challenged those institutions represented in the room to consider grabbing this particular brass ring. ...

There’s an AP story about open textbooks making the rounds in a variety of outlets over the last few days (e.g., ABC News). The story includes some quotes from David Anderson, executive director for higher education at the Association of American Publishers. It boggles my mind that someone whose industry faces an existential threat from open educational resources (OER) still doesn’t know what open means. How can you effectively fight the enemy you fundamentally fail to understand? In describing the industry’s response to OER, the article states: ...

Suppose a faculty member decides she wants to provide some positive reinforcement to students in her class next semester. She decides that each time a student scores 80% or higher on an exam, she’ll send them an email congratulating them and encouraging them to keep up the good work. Now, she has to decide how to send these messages. After a little thought, she decides she has four options: Review the gradebook each Saturday, find everyone who meets the criterion, and send them each an email. Prewrite a series of appropriate emails and store them in a text document. Review the gradebook each Saturday, find everyone who meets the criterion, and send each of them one of the prewritten messages. Prewrite a series of appropriate emails and store them in a text document. Write a script that parses the gradebook each Saturday and generates a list of people who meet the criterion. Send one of the prewritten messages to each person on the list generated by the script. Prewrite a series of appropriate emails and store them in a text document. Write a script that parses the gradebook each Saturday, generates a list of people who meet the criterion, and sends each of them one of the prewritten messages. As she considers these four options, our faculty member wants to ensure that students are actually receiving a message “from their teacher” and that students will interpret the messages as such. ...

Yesterday EdSurge published an opinion piece by Stephen Laster, the Chief Digital Officer at McGraw-Hill Education, titled The Future of Education Isn’t Free. It’s Open. The article makes a strong argument for the importance of interoperability among learning platforms, tools, and content. I enthusiastically and wholeheartedly endorse this message - interoperability of platforms, tools, and resources is absolutely critical to education becoming significantly more effective - and significantly less annoying - in the future. ...

Last week I read a really incredible paper published as OA in Nature titled, The global landscape of cognition: hierarchical aggregation as an organizational principle of human cortical networks and functions. In addition to breaking some terrific new methodological ground, the paper provides a first glimpse at what we might call a “Biological Bloom’s Taxonomy.” The elements in the cognitive domain of Bloom’s Taxonomy are listed in an order that goes from simplest (e.g., remembering facts) to most difficult (e.g., creative synthesis). There are theoretical reasons to believe that the ordering of elements in the taxonomy is appropriate. However, there is room for argument about the ordering of elements in the taxonomy (not to mention its composition), as we saw when Anderson and Krathwohl published a revised version of the taxonomy in the early 2000s. ...

Martin’s post has inspired me to share the books I read in 2015, though I have not made the time to produce useless charts like he did. :) I must say that, after staying healthy, the biggest benefit of running is all the audio books I manage to read. Some things on my list are only in print (no audio), but they were super important to me to read. A few thoughts that occured to me as I made the list: I reread several books in preparation for reading new books that were released in a series this year. It will be no surprise to people who know me to see that Brandon Sanderson has his own category. I’m definitely tilting toward economics, and continue to be deeply interested in how to frame / describe / talk about “open” in the context of the discipline of economics. ...