Some years ago I had the opportunity to address a class taught by my good friend Erik Duval. I spoke about blogging. One of his students, eager to show how technically competent he was, glibly pointed out that the “blogging software” that was just becoming popular (Movable Type as I recall) did not provide any new capabilities. He could already do everything MT did using emacs. Erik’s response ran along the lines of, “Ok, Mr. Smarty Pants. Everyone else will use MT to post their online writing assignments this semester, but you can do all of yours by hand.” After only a moment’s reflection, he realized he had won the battle but lost the war. ...

More than half the readers of my April fool’s post about me quitting my job at BYU and going to work for the three companies that are the antithesis of everything I believe actually believed the post. Let me walk you through the post with commentary. Despite today’s date, which will correctly make this post impossible to believe, it is with a mixture of excitement, sadness, and dishonesty that I announce that I am leaving BYU. ...

As many of you know, my empirical work at BYU has focused largely on issues of sustainability. I’ve blogged some of it before, but to wrap it up in one spot, here is a recap of what we’ve been up to. Justin Johansen and I did some interesting work on OCW sustainability, examining what happens when opportunities to enroll in for-credit courses are integrated into OCW. The results - over 2.5% of OCW visitors became paying for-credit customers of BYU Independent Study, generating enough revenue to more than pay for the cost of opening access to the courses. An article version of the dissertation, with a few months more data, is forthcoming in Educational Technology Research and Development. ...

UPDATE: FOR THOSE OF YOU READING AFTER APRIL FIRST, THIS WAS AN APRIL FOOL’S POST. (See the first line and the last link for confirmation.) Despite today’s date, which will correctly make this post impossible to believe, it is with a mixture of excitement, sadness, and dishonesty that I announce that I am leaving BYU. “Once in a lifetime” opportunities never come for some people. But for me, they have come twice. The first was the opportunity to work at BYU. I suppose most of the readers of my blog have never been to BYU and know little about it other than its affiliation with the LDS (Mormon) church. BYU’s mission statement reads: ...

Yesterday Michael tweeted: @opencontent Would be grateful for your input to this conversation: http://bit.ly/dzECrZ He’s referring to a thread of conversation around Anya’s new book, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. In his initial post, Michael says, Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think the DIY U vision is a bad one. To the contrary, there are many aspects of it that are good, necessary, and overdue. I just don’t think it’s a complete vision. ...

Dr. John Hilton, who until just recently was a doctoral student of mine, has written a great dissertation on the impact giving away free ebooks has on sales of printed books. The findings may surprise you. Here’s a repost of the description from his blog: I’ve posted on my dissertation before. The full version is now available here. Here’s a little summary of what the dissertation is all about. What Deseret Book placed eight books online for free download. All of these were “backlist” titles. This study tracked what happened as a result of those books being available. ...

As pointed out in a post on the Brookings Institution blog, large-scale federally-funded OER won’t be coming this year: Buried beneath the much-deserved hullaballoo over the passage of health care reform were big changes that the reconciliation bill makes to the federal student loan program… Less noticed, however, is a provision that was in the House-passed Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) this fall, but dropped from the final version that passed last night…. [W]ith Pell Grant spending up due to the poor state of the economy, and the pressure to keep the total cost of the bill down while achieving expanded health insurance coverage and deficit reduction, the AGI got left on the cutting-room floor. ...

In response to Dave and George’s request for thoughts about the future of education, I offer the following parody. This twisted view of the future of education is completely undesirable, and yet completely possible. What will you do to prevent it from happening?

On Friday Stephen wrote a brief, interesting piece on “playing the religion card” in the realm of public policy. I think I agree with what he wrote, and want to state my view explicitly for the record as a way of . Excerpting from Stephen’s post: [N]o particular religion can or should have the means to impose its particular view on society. This is not to say that people can not or should not live and represent their moral and spiritual values. Nobody has a problem with that, not even the atheists. Rather, it means that if you advocate “policy x” because your religious views compel you to do so, your advocacy of “policy x” will have to be on the basis of its own merits, not because “Canada was founded based on the principles of religion y”…. Play the religion card with great caution. You may be religious; I don’t care. But when you try to cram religion into government, I get very very upset. ...

George’s recent post about data visualization makes me realize I need to get around to sharing some of the work we’re doing here. My main research group at BYU is spending most of its time these days on educational data mining and applying / developing visualization techniques (including “dashboards”). We’ve taken to calling the coupling of openness with real data the “peanut butter cup” model, because openness and data really are two great tastes that taste great together. More on peanut butter cups in an upcoming post. ...