Helping people adopt evidence-based practices is notoriously difficult. Even in matters of life and death, evidence-based practices frequently go unadopted or take an incredibly long time to enter widespread use. As Bauer, et al. (2015) explain, It has been widely reported that evidence-based practices (EBPs) take on average 17 years to be incorporated into routine general practice in health care. Even this dismal estimate presents an unrealistically rosy projection, as only about half of EBPs ever reach widespread clinical usage. ...

I absolutely love people who make the Herculean effort necessary to view well-known things from a distinctly different point of view. One person making that effort is Chiara Marletto. I was introduced to her work a few years and reminded of it again this week by the wonderful interview with her in Quanta Magazine. (I was ecstatic to learn that she has published a book about her work - The Science of Can and Can’t: A Physicist’s Journey through the Land of Counterfactuals - which is already loaded up in my Audible.) ...

There’s a really terrific conversation happening on the cc-openedu listserv. It started out as a question about OER, but has moved on to a conversation about the purposes of open more generally. Dr. Chuck contributed over the weekend, and his contribution provides a great opportunity for me to respond with the first substantive post since I changed the name of the blog. All the pull quotes in this post are from Dr. Chuck. He writes: ...

My blog has changed names twice over the years. Today, after 15 years, it’s changing again. Before I had a “real” blog, I published random thoughts on whatever personal website my then-current university would give me access to, starting in 1993. Remember tilde accounts? (davidwiley.com / davidwiley.org has always (since 1995) been a personal home page, and not a place where I’ve published a lot of writing.) In the early 2000s, Brian Lamb introduced me to RSS and Moveable Type and I put down some blog roots at reusability.org. That first “real” blog was named Autounfocus, in recognition of the way it bounced back and forth between a pretty wide range of topics:A few years later, when Movable Type announced they were considering changing from open source to a proprietary licensing model, I briefly experimented with Plone as my blogging platform. But I quickly ended up moving to Wordpress - and opencontent.org - in February, 2005. At that point I renamed the blog Iterating Toward Openness, and later chose a new byline:Holy smokes! That’s 15 years ago now. How time flies. ...

Curt Bonk and I recently published a Preface for a special issue of ETR&D on Systematic Reviews of Research on Learning Environments and Technologies. It is largely a collection of personal stories and reflections about the arc of learning technologies over the last 30 years. However, we close with some advice which I believe to be profoundly important for everyone working in and around the learning technologies field, include open advocates. ...

Dashboards in educational contexts are usually comprised of visualizations of educational data. For example, dashboards inside the LMS are often comprised of line charts, bar graphs, and pie charts of data like logins and quiz scores. The primary goal of educational dashboard design is, ostensibly, for them to be “actionable.” In other words, a teacher, student, or administrator should be able to take an action after spending time interpreting a dashboard. For that to be possible, three questions must be answered in the affirmative. ...

UPDATE: I borrowed the “community based” language in the title of this post from Martin’s blog, which reminded me of Yochai’s article and prompted this post. That language has caused confusion on social media. (Long-time readers of this blog will be surprised to learn that definitions matter!) I should have used Yochai’s language of “peer production of educational materials” from the start. Perhaps that would have headed off some of the misunderstanding on Twitter. Perhaps. ...

Reposting this message I sent to the Learning Analytics mailing list earlier this morning. When I hear people say “learning engineering” I hear them talking about Reese’s cups. I hear them talking about delicious chocolate (instructional design, or applied learning science or whatever you like to call it) and yummy peanut butter (learning analytics, or educational data mining, or whatever you like to call it). Chocolate and peanut butter are two things that, individually, taste great. And they taste even better together. In fact, they taste so much better together that people gave the combination its own name! They didn’t give this heaven-sent sweetie its own name in order to exercise dominance over either the chocolate or peanut butter industries. It was just really convenient to have a specific name to talk about this utterly fantastic combination of things. “I want a Reese’s cup!” ...

This fall I’m once again teaching IPT 531: Introduction to Open Education at BYU (check it out - it’s designed so anyone can participate) and today I’m beginning a pilot run-through of the course redesign with a small number of students. I wanted to include a reading summarizing my current thinking on ’evaluating the impact of OER’ in the course, so I’m letting some thoughts spill out below. This framework will be continuously improved over time. ...

Long-time readers will be familiar with “learning objects” and the “reusability paradox.” If you’ve been working in educational technology since the 1990s, you might want to skip the first section below. Or you may find it a sentimental walk down memory lane. Learning objects and the reusability paradox A learning object is “any digital resource that can be reused to support learning” (Wiley, 2000), and the goal of the learning objects movement was to design learning materials that were sufficiently small and self-contained as to be easily reused across many different learning contexts. Remember the joy of digging into a bin of Legos, pulling out random pieces and assembling them into whatever your heart fancied? This was the promise of learning objects, which were compared to Legos in almost every conference presentation and journal article on the topic. ...