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. ...

Despite thoughtful disagreement about the term “infrastructure” from people I greatly respect, I continue to find the term extraordinarily useful in my own thinking about how we improve education. As interest in competency-based education continues to grow, we have an incredible opportunity to expand and to open the core pieces of the education infrastructure. But before I go further, a few words about “infrastructure” to make sure we’re all on the same page. ...

The ideas expressed in the Reclaim Your Domain and IndieWebCamp work continue to inform my thinking about the 5th R (retain) and the notion that students should be able to “Own Your Content, Own Your Data” when it comes to online learning. A few weeks ago I ran across Known which fascinated me but looked to be too immature to use yet. Then Jim described Tim Owens’ experiments with Known. That gave me enough confidence to dig into the code myself and see if I couldn’t get it running. ...

I’ve just started working on a major competency-based education (CBE) initiative with Lumen (specifics coming soon), which has helped me see that the principles of open education are, generally speaking, nowhere to be found in the competency-based education space. To be clear - many institutions are using OER in their CBE programs, but almost every institution doing CBE seems to hoard their competencies like the family recipe for a secret sauce. You know what this made me think… ...

If you’re interested in learning how to make a sustainable difference in the world, you absolutely must study and meditate on the caps lock wisdom of FAKE GRIMLOCK, the Robot Dinosaur. No matter how often I read him, I find his writing inspiring, hysterical, and worth pondering at length. His halting style of writing practically begs you to stop and reflect on what exactly he’s roaring at you. And you should. ...

Stephen has written a terrific post on connectivism as a learning theory. This is one of the briefest - and consequently, best - statements I’ve read on the subject. Let me begin by saying that I’m a fan of connectivism. Personally, I’m inclined to be persuaded by the connectivist account as Stephen, George, and others have articulated it. But - while I haven’t read every piece written on the topic - those I have read contain a gaping hole which I feel must be addressed before the theory can be considered complete and, therefore, a legitimate alternative to longer established learning theories. ...

Back in December Michael Feldstein wrote a terrific post about Pearson’s new initiative around “efficacy.” There has been a great thread of comments attached to his (as always) excellent piece of writing. I’ve been wanting to add my thoughts on the topic for a while. I’m finally getting around to it. The Conversation Can’t Be About Efficacy (Only) Many of you know I am hugely inspired by Bloom’s work on the “2 sigma problem.” In many ways, Bloom’s work is the last word in instructional efficacy - for three decades now there has been no mystery whatsoever about the most effective way to teach. Bloom and his group showed conclusively that the average student who: ...

Watching Mike’s screencast of the rewiki prototype lead me down memory lane to a tool we built back in the day called Send2Wiki. Here’s a summary from the extensions page at Mediawiki: Provides a bookmarklet that makes it easy to send web pages to a wiki. Converts web page HTML to wiki format (using html2wiki by David J. Iberri). Strips chrome from web pages during the conversion process. Displays information about sent articles in the MediaWiki footer. Optionally translates web page to another language (using Google’s Language Tools). Preserves links by converting relative links to absolute ones. Autodetects license information such as Creative Commons and GFDL licenses. Lets the user specify a license for the the new wiki page. Sends PDFs to the wiki by first converting them to HTML (using PDFTOHTML based on xpdf 2.02 by Derek Noonburg). Creates didilies describing the conversion. Basically, you setup the extension on your Mediawiki and then installed the bookmarklet in your browser. Then you could push the content from any page you’re looking at into your Mediawiki with the click of a button and a few options: ...

There have been a number of responses to my decision to introduce a 5th R - “Retain” - to my 4Rs framework. Bill, Darren, and Mike have responded, among others. Some parts of the responses lead me to believe that I wasn’t entirely clear in my initial statement, so let me try to clear a few things up. The original 4Rs were not an attempt to create a new group of permissions that open content licenses needed to support. Many open content licenses, from the CC to the GFDL to the OPL, already granted the rights to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute long before I created the 4Rs framework. I created the 4Rs framework specifically for the purpose of helping people understand and remember the key rights that open content licenses grant them. ...

[caption id=“attachment_3244” align=“alignright” width=“300”] via MIke Caulfield[/caption] I recently received the excellent news that I will receive another year of support as a Shuttleworth Fellow. These fellowships are extremely generous and I’m incredibly grateful for the foundation’s vote of confidence in the work I’m doing supporting widespread OER adoption through Lumen Learning. As many of you know, Shuttleworth Fellows also have the opportunity to pitch the Foundation for project funding. The foundation has also chosen to support our project proposal this year, and I’m extremely excited to start sharing the idea we’re working on with the community. ...