A brief history of the impending transformation of post-secondary education, just to clarify where we are, followed by some commentary. Dates are approximate as I’m working from memory on an airplane. Perhaps later I’ll turn this into a proper piece of writing with supporting links, etc., if folks find it interesting. 7x - The internet. Data can be routed from computer to computer. The cost of copying and distributing content begins its drop toward zero. ...

One of the mainstays of my approach to open teaching is the “public performance” of student work. Since 2004 I’ve been encouraging the learners I work with to post their writing and other artifacts to publicly readable blogs. I have seen, time and again, that a different quality of work is done when people are making a permanent contribution to the “great conversation” compared to the work people do when they think that only the TA grading papers will see it. ...

Elaine and I spent some time this weekend looking at pictures taken by a friend who served an LDS mission in Japan (where Elaine and I both served) back in the early 90s. As we carefully passed the photos around, I realized that my feeling about print media has changed subtlety over the years. It had been a long time since I’d handled a photo that didn’t start life digitally. I realized as I tried not to harm this one-of-a-kind artifact that my intuition, for lack of a better word, is that print media are cheap, almost disposable approximations of digital media. My gut tells me now that a printed photo is just an ephemeral version of the real photo, which is digital. ...

There’s a deeply insightful post on O’Reilly Radar today by Mike Loukides called “The end of social.” It’s primarily a piece about friction, and the social signaling value of acts undertaken when a friction cost is incurred (I like that term - “friction cost” - I think that’s a keeper): To many people, Facebook’s “frictionless” sharing doesn’t enhance sharing; it makes sharing meaningless. Let’s go back to music: It is meaningful if I tell you that I really like the avant-garde music by Olivier Messiaen. It’s also meaningful to confess that I sometimes relax by listening to Pink Floyd. But if this kind of communication is replaced by a constant pipeline of what’s queued up in Spotify, it all becomes meaningless. There’s no “sharing” at all. Frictionless sharing isn’t better sharing; it’s the absence of sharing. There’s something about the friction, the need to work, the one-on-one contact, that makes the sharing real, not just some cyber phenomenon. If you want to tell me what you listen to, I care. But if it’s just a feed in some social application that’s constantly updated without your volition, why do I care? It’s just another form of spam, particularly if I’m also receiving thousands of updates every day from hundreds of other friends. ...

Congrats to the UMass for their pilot OER program which is saving students over 7x the university’s investment in the very first year. Eight faculty members were awarded a total of 10 grants, $1,000 per course, to adopt a new curricular resource strategy using easily identified digital resources. Under the program, faculty developed a variety of alternatives, from creating an online open access lab manual to utilizing e-books and streaming media available through the Libraries’ numerous databases. In support of this initiative, librarians developed a comprehensive subject guide to open educational resources. ...

Steve Carson has a terrific proposal on his blog this week: What would happen in the US, I wonder, if US News & WR suddenly began considering transparency and knowledge dissemination as embodied in OCW/OER projects as a part of its formula? I’m sure they are lobbied all the time for changes to the formula, but I think there is a pretty good case to be made here… Any thoughts on how to start the campaign? ...

I frequently describe openness and analytics as chocolate and peanut butter - both are tasty individually, but together their synergy is truly remarkable. Until recently we only had one example - CMU’s OLI - where this synergy was really running at full steam: openness providing permission to make improvements to curriculum and analytics providing empirical evidence about what changes are needed. (Note that neither the permission nor the evidence alone are nearly as powerful as the two together.) CMU OLI also leverages openness to increase the number of students using their material, which in turn generates more data, which in turn enables more powerful analytics, which in turn leads to better material, etc. CMU OLI’s openly available research shows the progress they’re making on using openness and analytics to improve student learning. ...

For Winter 2012 I’m scheduled to teach a graduate current issues seminar here at BYU. Rather than teach the same Introduction to Open Education I’ve taught in the past, I’m going to expand out and teach “Introduction to Openness in Education.” While I’m going to include much more than just OER, I am going to restrict the topics covered to things directly applicable to education. This broader set of topics is what, to me, really constitutes Open Education. However, because people have somehow managed to conflate Open Education with OER, I’m going to try this new title. ...

Here’s a quick wordcloud of the OpenEd11 tweets together with a text file containing links to all the individual tweets. Do something interesting with them! And don’t forget to watch the full video of the #opened11 keynotes and concurrent sessions at http://openedconference.org/2011/.

As part of my work on the NGLC-funded Kaleidoscope Project I’ve been thinking about practical learning analytics. Why “practical”? My goal with practical learning analytics is to provide access to data in ways that an average teacher, with no special training, can leverage in order to help her students succeed. This is, of course, an extremely tall order. As I began to mull over some common conventions that teachers could interpret without training (e.g., time flows left to right, scores move higher and lower) I realized that there’s already a tool available that provides visualizations like this - the Google Motion Chart Gadget. ...