Recently I’ve been thinking about the difference between an informational resource and an educational resource. I’ve had the sense that an educational resource is an informational resource with a little something extra and have enjoyed coming back to this thought again and again over the last several weeks, trying to reduce this “something extra” to its simplest form. Keeping the discussion informal, it seems that an informational resource is simply a compilation or collection of information - ideas, facts, processes, procedures, &c. I think of an encyclopedia as being the quintessential information resource - comprehensive, accurate, and well-organized. If you accept that definition (for sake of this argument), what would need to be added to an informational resource to make it an educational resource? ...

It was a striking moment of cognitive dissonance for me. I was at a conference and saw David Wiley - well known as a scholar and professor - sitting behind a booth in the trade show. And I realized there’s a perspective where the transition from academic to entrepreneur is an advancement in career. I will probably never understand this way of thinking, but in the Land of Opportunity south of the Canadian border, apparently it holds true. (Stephen Downes) ...

I was recently invited to participate in a Three Days of Focus conversation including the reusability paradox on the OE Global platform. The conversation opens for public participation this Wednesday. This is my initial contribution to the conversation. Thanks to Alan and others for the invitation to participate in this conversation. If you didn’t make it all the way through my 2002 article linked above (and I wouldn’t blame you!), the Reusability Paradox can be stated in its simplest form as follows: ...

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. ...