A student asked me today to list the 10 people who have most influenced my thinking and work (no religious figures). I only spent about 10 minutes doing this, but here’s my quick list. Apologies to everyone who probably should be on this list who I’ve offended by leaving them off. However, this seemed interesting enough that I ought to share. And yes, I realize there are more than 10 people on this list. ...

In our Utah Open Textbooks Project we’ve been closely monitoring the costs of deploying open textbooks to see if / how / when they can be less expensive than traditional textbooks. It turns out there are many, many ways to use open textbooks that are actually more expensive than traditional textbooks. We’ve learned several lessons this past year about what contributes to costs, where and how to print, etc. Today we’ve released the first version of a calculator that provides an interactive way to explore the best case scenario under a very specific assumption - that you want to provide a printed book to every student. (Arguments about how much money schools would save using online textbooks almost always omit the cost of the hardware and internet connectivity these models presume.) Even in the best case scenario, there are several ways to waste money. However, when done correctly, it is absolutely possible to provide a printed textbook to every student that they can keep forever, highlight, and take notes in - while still saving over 50% off the cost of buying a traditional textbook. ...

For some time now I’ve been concerned because we don’t understand openness. A recent conversation involving Tony, Rory, and Terry demonstrated this confusion, even among (rightly) respected experts in the field. The crux of Rory’s response to Tony’s original post is instructive. Over and over again, he dismisses Tony’s criticisms by saying ’this is not an argument against OER.’ Rory is claiming that criticisms of OER that don’t actually have anything to do with OER are terribly unfair. It should go without saying that claiming benefits for OER that don’t have anything to do with OER is also unfair. Consequently, before we can talk about importance, value, contribution, impact, or make any other evaluative statements about OER, we have to be crystal clear about what open means in this context, and how open educational resources are different from educational resources. ...

The Call for Proposals for Open Education 2011 is now online: http://openedconference.org/2011/call-for-proposals/

Mike responded to my recent toothbrush analogy with a thoughtful response which included this tidbit: The most elegant defense of what I’ll call the input theory of OER is “We just publish by-products of of work, which is sustainable (we have to do the work anyway) and useful (after all, we’re using it).” I’m sympathetic to this view — the best view of the input theory lot. In a lot of disciplines, it’s pretty close to the truth. So let’s discuss why the input theory works in some applications, but tends to fail in education. ...

I was recently asked to contribute a brief piece on the topic “Will Online Courses Transform Education?” for the Deseret News, a Utah newspaper. They ran the piece today; I’m syndicating it here for those of you who don’t read the DesNews. Readers of my blog will have heard me say much of it before, but here it is again in a condensed form. Hundreds of years ago, before the invention of the printing press, education was not very different than it is today. Students piled into university classrooms with the medieval equivalent of empty notebooks. Because hand-copied books were so incredibly expensive to purchase, students spent a large portion of class time listening to teachers slowly read classics to them, so that students could copy them down by hand. Just imagine writing out your own copy of Aristotle’s Ethics or Plato’s Republic by hand! ...

Thank you, thank you, thank you Governor Herbert! To those in the Utah legislature concerned about the financial cost of GRAMA, here’s an idea. Since we’re talking about electronic communications used to conduct public business, why not just cc: all these communications to a giant public repository in the sky the first time you send that email or txt? Then instead of “us citizens” making expensive GRAMA requests, we can just pull the information we want out of the repository ourselves? I strongly suspect the cost to maintain this service would be much lower than the current cost of manually processing GRAMA requests. Empower us to do things for ourselves. We’re capable. ...

I’ve finally made some time to contribute another installment in my ongoing conversation with Steve Carson about the value of open educational resources. I think OER are like toothbrushes. Once upon a time there was a non-profit organization dedicated to oral hygiene. This organization applied for and received a large, multi-year grant to give away toothbrushes. They set up multiple distribution points around the country, and soon 10s of 1000s of people were dropping by to pick up toothbrushes each day. ...

Headline says it all. After much unhappiness from the community, the Department of Labor has eased the SCORM requirement on the $2B in funding for OER development announced recently. The new guidelines for promoting interoperability are here: http://www.doleta.gov/grants/pdf/SGA-DFA-10-03-AMENDMENT1_2-8-11.pdf

I frequently hear people attempt to equate the open education movement with socialism. After all, the logic goes, what could possibly be more socialist than freely sharing things with everyone? The attempt to characterize the entire movement in a single assertion assumes a uniformity within the movement that anyone working in OER knows does not exist. I will neither agree or disagree with broad, general assertion in this post. Instead, I want to disagree with the statement in a very specific context, and carve out a specific and concrete space in the discourse about the motivations that underlie OER. ...