A few weeks ago I came across a tape in a cardboard box. The tape contained a few quick piano sketches I wrote during 1990-1991 and recorded while living in Japan. One tape-to-mp3 conversion later, and these six poorly recorded pieces are now in the Internet Archive with track titles and everything - like a real album, but without the talent. There’s nothing terribly special about these pieces musically - they are, in fact, quite formulaic. And as my friend Steve once said to me, I apparently don’t know how to end a song. But they offer a fun little peak into my musical thinking before my undergraduate training, and make for good trivia. You’ll likely not care, but since I went to the trouble of digitizing and archiving them, I thought I might as well share. ...

I recently received a copy of a letter the US Chamber of Commerce is circulating in opposition to H.R. 5037, the Federal Research Public Access Act. Since I decided to respond to the letter at length, I thought I would share my response with the community. Below I quote their letter in full with paragraph-by-paragraph responses to their argument. Dear Chairman Towns and Ranking Member Issa: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest business federation representing the interests of more than three million businesses and organizations of every size, sector, and region, opposes H.R. 5037, the “Federal Research Public Access Act,” and urges you not to bring it before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for consideration. ...

As reported by the OA Librarian, Open Education News, and others, the Federal Research Public Access Act has been introduced in the US House. taxpayeraccess.org has more detail and information about how you can get involved. The awesome Govtracker is currently showing H. R. 5037 has having been referred to the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Government Reform. Go check and see if you have a congressman on the subcommittee. I do! I sent him this letter this morning. ...

I’ve been reading George’s writing on the unique ideas in connectivism. Two assertions leap out at me in his list of how connectivism is different from other approaches. First is the statement that “the same structure of learning that creates neural connections can be found in how we link ideas and in how we connect to people and information sources. One scepter to rule them all.” This sounds almost exactly like the claim made in John Anderson and Lael Schooler’s 1991 Reflections of the Environment in Memory, which I consider one of the finest pieces of research in our field: ...

The nicely edited video of my TEDxNYED talk is now online. I previously posted the notes I created before I produced the slides. The TEDxNYED folks asked us to produce new material for this talk and not just give an existing talk again. I apparently took this advice more literally than some of the other presenters. Consequently, this is the first time I’ve given this talk and there are a few stumbles along the way. However, I feel like it’s a fair representation of my current thinking. I also managed to sneak in the shout out I promised my youngest daughter (around 7:45). ...

I’m making a list of free / inexpensive tools for gathering data in open education contexts. These are tools that I can install on the wikis, blogs, and other sites I maintain where I curate and structure content for my students. Unfortunately, my list is rather short… What tools are you using to gather data from your online courses that I’m missing? Google Analytics Userfly Tynt For example, is there something you use to track which outgoing links people are clicking on? A tool you use to associate repeat visits and activity with the same individual (anonymously)? What kind of data are you collecting from your OER? How are you using it to improve your students’ experience? To improve your teaching? Are they plugins for Wordpress or Mediawiki or some other platform? Are they “one line embeds” like the tools listed above? What tools do we need the most that don’t exist yet? ...

Stevan Harnad takes issue with my Pay Twice argument. Since we’re both on the same team here, surely he won’t mind a response to his response. David Wiley’s version of the double-payment objection is only partly correct. To the extent that both research funding and research library funding are paid by the tax-payer, there is indeed some double-paying — but the one who gets the free ride is the publisher, who gets to charge for access to material most of which was funded by the tax-payer. (But not so for peer review, which the publisher manages, though the reviewing is again actually being done for free by the peers. Nevertheless, an honest broker is needed to manage the peer review, or else it’s vanity press. The cost of managing peer review is much less than the cost of publishing, but it will be an invariant expense that needs to be paid no matter what.) ...

SEE THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST FOR A GREAT UPDATE! Khan Academy is a truly amazing educational website. It’s loaded with over 1,000 videos on a wide variety of topics in math, science, and finance. And while all the videos on the site were made by one guy working in his spare time (until just a few months ago), the KA site purportedly receives as much traffic as MIT OCW. ...

I’ve recently heard some conversation trying to sully or tarnish the idea of openness by associating it with socialism. (Of course, if there’s anything you don’t like in the US today the standard response is to label it “socialist,” despite the fact that many labelers can neither define nor spell the term properly.) However, from my perspective some of the most important forms of openness are simply about obeying one of the standard laws of capitalism: if I pay for a good or service, I am entitled to the good or service. Could the market (or society) survive if we didn’t obey this rule? ...

Stephen shared this video today on OLDaily. It’s a sad spoof of the impending collapse of the public school system in California. Hot for Teachers w/ Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green from Megan Fox I reblogged this video with the title “Stephen Gets His Wish” (with mostly humorous intent) based on his recent post, We Learn. In the post, Stephen describes the manner in which educational institutions are severely damaging children’s learning: ...