METADATA RECORD Name: John Arnim ?? Wiley Release Date: June 22, 2005 @ 1:00pm MDT Size: 19.5 inches x 6 lbs 15 ounces ...

With our fourth child about to be born (literally any day now), yesterday I received word from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that our most recent grant proposal has been formally approved. This will provide us with 18 months time more in which to evangelize open education, support universities as they start OpenCourseWare initiatives with our eduCommons software, training, and evangelsim support, make publishing open educational resources easier by integrating and improving our OLS and eduCommons tools, and migrate USU OCW from our research center into the university’s Faculty Assistance Center for Teaching. ...

So, getting the formal CFP together has taken some time, but here is the official CFP for the TICL issue on Learning Objects and Pedagogy that Marie Duncan and I will be editing. Please submit something! ...

I don’t know when I’ve laughed so hard recently. Today I received a check in the mail from ProQuest for $16.11 US. Upon inspection, this check represents my royalties on copies of my dissertation that ProQuest sold during 2004. Apparently, they sold 24 copies of my dissertation, making a cool $700 in the process (22 downloads and 2 paper copies), and I get $16 bucks. Don’t people know they can download my dissertation for free??? It’s the #2 return on a Google search for wiley and dissertation. And who would pay $40 bucks for my dissertation? Well, it certainly cheered up my Tuesday afternoon at any rate… If I save up my money, and they sell 25 more this year, I might even be able to afford to buy my own copy of it!

It’s that time of year again! Last year’s Open Education Conference at USU was described by several as “the best conference I ever attended.” This year’s conference should be even better. Keynotes this year include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information) and Yochai Benkler (Coase’s Penguin). The Call for Papers is available now. Please submit something! General information on the conference, including a Flyer and Presentation Slide you can use to help us advertise, is available at http://cosl.usu.edu/conference/.

I love Stephen. I really do. He pushes my thinking. In a recent comment he has got me thinking about how hard it is to provide help (or, by extension, to educate someone) in a morally appropriate manner. Below I pull out several quotes from his comments on my previous post and respond. It’s moderately long, but in the end I believe I find that help is not so hard to give and that education is not a dirty word. ...

I keep reflecting on Teemu’s recent comment… The aim of reaching everyone is immoral. It seems to be a project of expanding the banking concept of education where “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.” Going back several blog posts to the original statement, it seems that much of the stir was caused by my (perhaps unfortunate) use of the word “education.” Some will say that “education” is evil because it is traditionally forced on people who don’t want it by people who feel like they need it.* But if I did not mean that we need to work so that the “education forcibly imposed on poor, helpless individuals by an evil empire” will reach out to everyone, what did I mean? If educators and instructional technologists aren’t the pawns of Satan, what is that I imagine them doing? To put it simply, I imagine them empowering or, more simply, helping. I think our primary task is helping. ...

So, I’m still hearing from people about my scalability comments. Just to restate: there’s nothing evil about scalability itself. Scalability is about reaching lots of people, and reaching lots of people is an important intermediate goal. My only concern is that we might stop there - we might stop when our business plans and technology allow us to reach 90% of people and say “we’re finished!” Now, reaching 90% is obviously better than only reaching 45%. But why don’t we reach the other 10%? Not enough money in their “market”? Worse yet, have we just forgotten they exist? Do we think that reaching 90% is really reaching everyone? If educators and instructional designers aren’t the champions of learning, who will be? ...

There’s something about the notion of reuse that seems to confuse people. They think “reusable resources” like those in an OpenCourseWare collection should “just work out of the box.” We frequently hear about “design tips” for making learning objects more reusable; what we almost never hear about is “design tips” for how to reuse existing materials. It seems to me that the all-time best example of reuse, the one that all instructional designers should study as a case, and consequently the one about which I am writing a longer piece now, is The Magnificent Seven. This film was, of course, a remake of Kurosawa’s Shichinin no Samurai. Perhaps we (instructional designers) should all be talking about “remaking” learning objects, and not “reusing” them, in order to better communicate the complicated process involved in taking a cultural artifact developed by another person for another audience and trying to make it speak meaningfully to our audience. ...

Lots of folks responded rather strongly to my suggestion that talking about and focusing on scalability is immoral. As usual, I appear to have done a poor job articulating my feelings. :) The focus on scalability scares me because it only focuses on reaching lots of people, on reaching large numbers of people, on reaching the majority of people. The amount of commitment necessary to reach all as opposed to many seems qualitatively different to me. I’m afraid that the focus on scaling, and talk about how great and worthy reaching the majority of people is, will allow instructional technologists to feel like they’re off the hook for reaching the few, the small numbers of people, the minority. ...