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. ...

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. ...