I’ve stopped saying the word “disrupt” since people began exclaiming it in a kind of religious ecstasy. At some point in the last 18 months or so, “disruption” has completed its slide down the proverbial slippery slope and has stopped being a means and become an end in and of itself. Ends-means confusion is a terrible mistake, and never bodes well for the people who make it. I expect it bodes even worse for an entire field of endeavor (I’m looking at you, educational technology) that seems to have wholeheartedly bought into the switcheroo. ...

At it’s core, the question of open pedagogy is “what can I do in the context of open that I couldn’t do before?” This turns out to be terribly difficult, because of the ubiquity (even ambience?) of copyright in our lives. An educator asking the question “what can I do pedagogically if I don’t have to worry about copyright?” is a bit like an aerospace engineer asking, “what could I do in rocket design if I no longer had to worry about gravity?” or a politician asking “what could I do if I no longer had to worry about the party system?” or a researcher asking “what could I do if funding were no longer a constraint?” ...

Our recent article, The Impact of Open Textbooks on Secondary Science Learning Outcomes, is now available for open access under a CC BY license. Read the abstract below, or grab the free PDF of the full article. Given the increasing costs associated with commercial textbooks and decreasing financial support of public schools, it is important to better understand the impacts of open educational resources on student outcomes. The purpose of this quantitative study is to analyze whether the adoption of open science textbooks significantly affects science learning outcomes for secondary students in earth systems, chemistry, and physics. ...

As our recent article on The Impact of Open Textbooks on Secondary Science Learning Outcomes in Educational Researcher demonstrated (OA version coming soon), when used in the K-12 context OER have the potential to provide local control, save districts significant money, support students in building up a personal library of science books, and improve learning outcomes. What can be done to help other students and schools enjoy the benefits of using OER? ...

Supporting Capacity Building as OER Use Enters Mainstream For over two years now I’ve been working full-time with the incredible folks at Lumen Learning on supporting faculty adoption of open educational resources. (Time really does fly when you’re having fun!) As indicated in the subtitle of our #OpenEd14 presentation - “still bumbling our way toward greatness” - we’ve made plenty of mistakes and learned lots of lessons along the way, and there’s no reason why others should bumble down unproductive paths we’ve already traversed. ...

#OpenEd14, the 11th annual Open Education Conference, has given me the opportunity to do some additional thinking about the Open Education Infrastructure. Unfortunately, thinking about infrastructure inexorably leads to creating diagrams. Because I’m hosting the conference I don’t time to write an extensive commentary now. Let me just say that people often ask, “What would people do if an open education infrastructure existed?” The primary answer is engage in open pedagogy. OER and the other components of the open education infrastructure are means, not ends. The end goal of the infrastructure, of course, is supporting better teaching and learning. ...

It’s widely understood that while faculty select the textbooks their students use, faculty neither pay for nor use textbooks. The fact that faculty don’t have to pay for the books they select is reflected by the data in the recent Babson survey showing that less than 3% of faculty feel that cost is an important factor to consider when selecting instructional materials. The fact that faculty don’t use (or even read) the textbooks they assign students is reflected in the countless student comments on end of course review forms each year complaining that the content of faculty lectures are frequently unrelated to the content of assigned textbook readings. But - while faculty frequently don’t use the textbooks, they almost always use the materials that publishers give them (for free) when they adopt a textbook - test item banks, presentation slides, video clips, etc. ...

The Babson OER Survey is incredible. If you care at all about OER, you absolutely need to read it. Then go read what Phil has written at e-Literate and 20 Million Minds. Go ahead. I’ll wait. The popular media will no doubt focus on the awareness findings in the report. On the most liberal measure of awareness, 65.9% faculty are completely unaware of OER. On a stricter measure, 73.6% of faculty are completely unaware. Phil characterizes these awareness findings as bad news for OER advocates in his 20MM article. He’s right, but for a far deeper reasons than he suggests. These awareness findings are bad news for OER advocates because it means there is still a huge window for traditional publishers to organize a massive FUD campaign against OER. If publisher’s can control faculty members’ first exposure to OER and attempt to control the messaging around OER, there may still be a chance for publishers to turn the tide back against OER. And make no mistake, the report clearly shows that the tide has already turned in favor of OER among faculty who are aware of OER. To me, the biggest takeaway from the Babson survey is this question - who will introduce the remaining 66%-75% of this country’s faculty to OER? Haters or advocates? ...

During conversations this week at the semi-annual meeting of the Shuttleworth Foundation Fellows, I was struck by (what is for me) a new way of contextualizing and understanding “open” - as one of a long line of technological innovations that radically improve productivity. History is filled with technological innovations that have increased our “productivity,” making it significantly less expensive for us to engage in some activity than it had been prior to the innovation. I have often thought of open as being part of the family tree of information technology innovations that includes inventions like writing, the printing press, computers, and the internet. But my previous conceptualization of these inventions was limited to a general notion of “inventions that enable us do that we couldn’t before.” This framing does not explicitly consider their impact of open on our productivity in a market sense. It was the juxtaposition of a conversation about sustainability with Fellows Peter Bloom and Johnny West against Jeremy Rifkin’s The Zero Marginal Cost Society, which I recently finished reading, that really catalyzed this new perspective. ...

One of the many improvements in my life since I started running has been the number of books I’ve been able to read (trans: listen to). Some of my recent running reading has been swirling around in my head during the semi-annual meeting of Shuttleworth Foundation Fellows I’m currently attending in Malta. This meeting is always a fantastic opportunity to think, rethink, and reconceptualize “open.” No, I haven’t changed my mind about open. But I do think there is an additional way to think about open, another perspective that can add to our understanding of the construct, that I don’t hear people talking about. ...