In his seminal essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond popularized the following quote he attributes to Antoine de Saint-Exupery: “Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.” For 15 years the makers of learning management systems have been swimming upstream against this truth. They would benefit greatly by meditating on this principle, together with the more general Occam’s Razor and the more specific Zawinski’s Law. ...

Today President Obama announced that, in addition to the commitments already outlined in the US Open Government National Action Plan, the United States will take additional steps to make government more open, transparent, and accessible for all Americans. The announcement included the following commitments: Promote Open Education to Increase Awareness and Engagement Open education is the open sharing of digital learning materials, tools, and practices that ensures free access to and legal adoption of learning resources. There is a growing body of evidence that the use of open education resources improves the quality of teaching and learning, including by accelerating student comprehension and by fostering more opportunities for affordable cross-border and cross-cultural educational experiences. The United States is committed to open education and will: ...

The following is a pre-print of an essay set to appear in Bonk et al.’s forthcoming book MOOCs and Open Education around the World_. It may undergo some additional editing before publication. Unlike the rest of the content on opencontent.org, this article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license v4.0, as per my contract with Routledge. This essay remixes some material that was previously published on opencontent.org._ In this piece I briefly explore the damage done to the idea of “open” by MOOCs, advocate for a return to a strengthened idea of “open,” and describe an open education infrastructure on which the future of educational innovation depends. ...

I just learned that my colleague and friend Brent Lambert has passed on. As I’m reflecting on our relationship this morning, I want to share a few thoughts and feelings and stories. I met Brent when he entered the PhD program at USU. He came to us with a Masters degree (in CS), but no Bachelors. That always cracked me up about him - he was quirky like that. He loved making software and was extremely firm in his commitment to openness (and the other principles that guided his life). He had a passion for building things that would make the world a better place. Here’s an old blog post where I include his thinking on learning objects in a brief review of related thinking by folks like Wayne Hodgins, Stephen Downes, and Andy Gibbons. ...

Well, this has turned into a rather enjoyable conversation. To recap what has unfolded so far: It began with Jose Ferreira inviting me to appear on a panel at the Knewton Symposium, on the panel, I made the claim that in the near future 80 percent of general education courses would replace their commercial textbooks with OER, after the conference, Jose responded to my claim by telling publishers why I was wrong, I responded by explaining that the emergence of companies like Red Hat for OER would indeed make it happen, using the Learning Outcomes per Dollar metric as their principal tool of persuasion, and Michael Feldstein argued that it depends. Yesterday, Brian Jacobs of panOpen published an essay contributing to the conversation. While I agree that some in the field have yet to pick up on a few of the points he makes, I’m a little perplexed that he would choose to position these points as a response to writing by Michael, Jose, and me. By making these points in a response, he implies that we have yet to understand them. Take this bit for example: ...

#OpenEd14 is getting close! For a wide range of reasons, this year’s 11th annual Open Education Conference looks like it will be the best ever. One thing contributing to the awesomeness of this year’s conference is other events organized around the same time in the same area. One of these events is OpenCon 2014: The Student and Early Career Researcher Conference on Open Access, Open Education and Open Data, organized by SPARC and the Right to Research Coalition As the name implies, this event is really focused on engaging students and early career individuals and helping them become effective advocates in the openness movement. The meeting will run from November 15-17 in Washington, D.C., and the program includes three days of talks, workshops, and in-the-field advocacy experience (leveraging its location in Washington, DC). Of course, a delegation of participants from OpenCon will also attend OpenEd. ...

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to participate on a panel about OER at the Knewton Education Symposium. Earlier this week, Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira blogged about ‘OER and the Future of Publishing’ for EdSurge, briefly mentioning the panel. I was surprised by his post, which goes out of its way to reassure publishers that OER will not break the textbook industry. Much of the article is spent criticizing the low production values, lack of instructional design, and missing support that often characterize OER. The article argues that there is a potential role for publishers to play in each of these service categories, leveraging OER to lower their costs and improve their products. But it’s been over 15 years since the first openly licensed educational materials were published, and major publishers have yet to publish a single textbook based on pre-existing OER. Why? ...

Aaron Wolf is contributing to a nice thread in the comments under my description of the recently revised definition of the “open” in “open content”. I’ve revised my ShareAlike example to distribute blame evenly across Wikipedia and MIT OCW based on his comments. You can see the current version of the definition at http://opencontent.org/definition/. I want to address an accusation of Aaron’s here. He mentions other “definitions of Open that bother working to be precise and not vague,” in which category he includes the definitions from the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Free Cultural Works moderators, etc., in apparent contrast to my definition. I have a number of problems with all these definitions. I’ll address the OKF definition here just to provide a specific example. ...

Earlier this week I read the Wikipedia entry on open content. Suffice it to say I was somewhat disappointed by the way the editors of the page interpreted my writings defining the “open” in open content. I think their interpretation was plausible and legitimate, but it is certainly not the message I intended people to take away after reading the definition. So, the fault for my unhappiness is mine for not having been clearer in my writing. ...

There are several things I’ve read / heard recently that have provoked a response in me but I’ve been negligent in responding publicly. Dumping some of those thoughts out here. Personalization Audrey Watters provides the best summary of a recent conversation on personalization in education. A lot of the conversation is around what personalization means and, given any specific definition, should we even be attempting to personalize learning. Obviously, the answer to the latter question depends on how you address the former. ...