As everyone knows by now, BYU has decided to end it’s relationship with Blackboard and is pursuing a course Jon Mott and I characterized as an open learning network - a group of smaller, specialized tools that can be used independently or jointly in a small-pieces-loosely-joined sort of way. One of these tools is Syllabus Builder, which does exactly what you’d expect and then some. In addition to helping faculty get all the required bits into their syllabus (e.g., Honor Code), it also does nifty things like importing the official course learning outcomes from learningoutcomes.byu.edu and adapting last year’s syllabus to this year’s dates, accounting for things like those crazy Tuesdays that are actually Fridays. ...

This took me the better part of an hour to figure out so I thought I’d share. I’ve been trying to get Matt Turner’s GetBook.py working. It’s a Python script to generate epub ebooks from the books made available online by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. He wrote it primarily to make ebooks from the available Collected Works of Hugh Nibley (which is how I found it, searching for Nibley’s works in ePub format), but it will work for any of the books on the website. ...

Another full time employment opportunity in the open education space! The OpenCourseWare Consortium seeks to recruit a Community College Outreach Manager for a full time, two-year contract. The Outreach Manager will play a key role in helping the Consortium realize its goal of increasing the participation of community colleges in the open education movement. The Outreach Manager will work as part of a small multi-cultural and international team to promote increased access to and improvements in post-secondary education through the use, production and adaptation of OpenCourseWare and open educational resources. The Outreach Manager will also work closely with the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources Advisory Board, comprised of thought leaders from community colleges throughout the US. The position will be based in the United States, with duties conducted primarily online. Exact location is flexible and negotiable. ...

I went to grab a graphic for a presentation from the CC Metrics wiki this morning, and had two problems. First, some overly zealous people have placed a truly “free/libre/open” line in the graph. This is just going to confuse my audience. They are hearing about CC for the first time and don’t care about the arguments zealots or purists are having about what qualifies as a truly “Free Cultural Work.” Why on EARTH did CC ever involve itself in that, anyway? ...

A recent NY Times article describes a new company called OpenEd Solutions. The article describes OpenEd Solutions’ involvement in the failed attempt to launch charter schools in New York and Newark. ...

If my US-based friends haven’t started leaning on your elected representatives yet, it’s time. And it’s not time to encourage them to “stand their ground” - it’s time to encourage the to engage in principled compromise and get the job done that needs doing. Here’s the language I used; feel free to copy or adapt it if you like. Principled compromise is the foundation of progress in a multi-party system of governance. If you and the other leaders of our federal government continue to engage in protracted, immovable grandstanding on the debt ceiling, literally nothing will get accomplished beyond the long-term weakening of our already fragile economy. Pledges and other public statements by which you have backed yourself into a policy corner are not the concern of the American people. We really don’t care if there’s a path forward in which you can save face or not. We all feel like it’s absolutely unconscionable that this has dragged on this long. It’s time to quit grandstanding and engage in principled compromise to GET THE JOB DONE on raising the debt ceiling. ...

After reading Brian’s post about mycorrhizal networks I went digging around through some older papers and found this, an exploratory piece by my doc student Erin Brewer circa 2003. (Erin was my co-author on the Online Self-Organizing Social Systems paper.) As we examined biological models (like self-organization) to explain what we saw happening in informal online learning communities, mycorrhizal networks caught our attention. I’d forgotten about the topic until recent discussions in the ed tech blogosphere brought it back to memory… ...

Yesterday I (very briefly) argued for a networked view of both knowledge and learning that Stephen characterized as logical positivism. It was interesting to say the least. He quotes a portion of my writing, “The entire edifice of ‘complex learning’ is built on the foundation of ‘simple learning,’” and then makes what seems to me an incredible leap: This is logical positivism. To put the history of 20th century philosophy in a nutshell: it doesn’t work… an educational theory based on the theory of knowledge you espouse will not produce the sort of complex knowledge we know is required as an adult. ...

Several of the disagreements with my recent post were with the (apparently low) threshold I set for learning. I continue to believe that if (1) I don’t know something, and (2) after engaging in some process I do know it, that (3) I have learned something. It doesn’t matter to me how insignificant the thing I now know may appear to someone else. It doesn’t need to be the fundamental theorem of calculus or a complex skill like driving a car to qualify as learning. Learning a person’s name is learning. Gaining the ability to successfully complete any kind of paired-associate task, whether matching a name to a face, or a capital to a state, or a country name with a position on a map, is learning - even if you can describe it using pejorative terms like “memorization.” ...

Stephen calls me out for being mean-spirited and rude: “There’s no call for this sort of condescending and catty response to people who are trying their best to work through some difficult issues.” I think people who know me know that’s not the kind of person I am. In rereading my response I realize that my writing may have come off this way. That wasn’t my intent. My intent was to (1) voice my frustration that academics seem to enjoy problematizing things more than they enjoy trying to help you understand things, and to (2) provide a simple answer that covers the majority of cases, which I contend my definition does. If anyone interpreted today’s post as a personal attack, I’m sincerely sorry. ...