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. ...

An excellent presentation on Freire at AERA titled I’m Morpheus in this Hip-Hop Matrix: The Industry, Oppression, and the Word provoked some of the most (personally) interesting thinking I’ve done in a while. Short version: I’m now thinking that talking about the scalability of educational opportunity is immoral, and that there is a far bigger problem facing instructional technology researchers than simply making education more effective. ...

In a blog entry that still has me chuckling, my research and I were today described as not being out on the fringe at all, but rather representing “the establishment.” Hopefully someone will point the other faculty in the Instructional Technology department here to this post, so they can see how completely normal I really am… :)

Back in August of 2003 I proposed that rather than create a new education license, we rebrand the By-NC-SA license as the cc.edu. The idea had lots of traction on the list - Stephen even agreed eventually ;) - as did many others (see August - December 2003 posts). However, because of some push back from CC about rebranding as a strategy, the discussion moved another direction and to the frustration of many eventually fizzled out. ...

Back in August of 2003 I proposed that rather than create a new education license, we rebrand the By-NC-SA license as the cc.edu. The idea had lots of traction on the list - Stephen even agreed eventually ;) - as did many others (see August - December 2003 posts). However, because of some push back from CC about rebranding as a strategy, the discussion moved another direction and to the frustration of many eventually fizzled out. ...

Our annual conference (which several of you attended last year, thanks!) is back. Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education will take place September 28 - 30, 2005 in beautiful Logan, Utah. I’m *really* excited about the conference this year. A few highlights: Keynote speakers include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information, etc.) and Yochai Benkler (Coase’s Penguin, etc.) and one other (but we can’t say who yet). The Hewlett Foundation will be holding its annual open education fundees meeting in conjunction with the conference, which will bring several super interesting participants to the conference Finally, the group of universities that recently met at MIT to discuss their OpenCourseWare projects will be meeting again in conjunction with the conference, which will bring even more people doing really excellent open education work I’ll be able to say more later, but this is going to be an absolutely awesome conference. I hope you come! More details are available on the conference website. Registration isn’t open yet, but I’m so excited I just had to share…

Am I biased in my perspectives? Absolutely. Is there anyone who is not? No. So, now that I’ve owned up wholly and completely to the accusation that I am biased in my reading and interpretation of the study in question… Commenting on my previous post about the Fuchs & Woessmann study, Mihaly Nyary writes: “You have an agenda, and not the authors,” and provides the abstract to the study, which is in no way whatsoever related to the point I made yesterday. Let me try once more, and make a handful of other points along the way. ...

Am I biased in my perspectives? Absolutely. Is there anyone who is not? No. So, now that I’ve owned up wholly and completely to the accusation that I am biased in my reading and interpretation of the study in question… Commenting on my previous post about the Fuchs & Woessmann study, Mihaly Nyary writes: “You have an agenda, and not the authors,” and provides the abstract to the study, which is in no way whatsoever related to the point I made yesterday. Let me try once more, and make a handful of other points along the way. ...

So we’ve been updating all sorts of things lately. OpenContent.org has been laying more or less unproductive for a while, so it seemed like time to update it as well. OpenContent.org is now a mini-portal into several collections of open educational resources and the discussion forums around those. Have a look around, and if you can think of an open access collection I haven’t listed there (which you no doubt will), let me know. If you think OpenContent.org should be doing something completely different, let me know.

Slashdot is running a story about a highly questionable research study: The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today…. Indeed, the more pupils used computers, the worse they performed, said Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Wossmann of Munich University. While the report itself doesn’t seem to be available, I’m going to make a wild guess here: these tests were administered using #2 pencils and sheets of paper with many bubbles on them, which students diligently filled out. ...