This is a draft of a book chapter explaining the theoretical foundations (at a high level) of our Open Learning Support project. Attempts to explain the why and how of informal self-organinzing learning communities in under 4000 words. ...
After about a week’s downtime, reusability.org blogs are now functioning again (yes, everyone, you can now login again!). Many things happening at once here; just back from a super AERA; I’m hoping to make an OLS related announcement next week. Also finished some writing this last week which I hope to post soon…
A kindly phone call alerted me late today that EduCommons.org is now running porn links. “Great,” I thought, “we’ve been compromised.” If only that were the truth. The truth is much more painful. Somehow ownership of the domain educommons.org has mysteriously changed hands. And not only did the thieves steal the domain, they are still running the EduCommons logo at the top and have maintained some of the language from the original site. Effect - to the casual user educommons.org is still educommons.org. “And oh, what’s this!?! David has porn links on his sites now?!?” ...
Below is an online education parable I have been telling in talks for a few years now. I have finally written it down in order to publish it in my BackBurner column of AECT’s Tech Trends, but thought that autounfocus readers might enjoy it as well. ...
I can’t make a “formal announcement” yet, as we’re still working on the official name (probably Open Sustainable Education) and other details, but I can safely say that we now have administrative approval and pilot funding in place for an OpenCourseWare type project (ala MIT) at USU. The USU collection will be specifically strong in agriculture (i.e., irrigation engineering, orchard development, etc. – Go Aggies!) but include resources from other university courses as well. Formal announcement coming soon… ...
Found this fabulous analysis of group size as it relates to group cohesion, satisfaction, etc. via Seb’s weblog. Very nice. I’m interested in how this may change online, or not, and what the role of weak ties is here…
Here’s another SourceForge for educational materials project – http://opencourse.org/. They’ve beaten us to the punch and actually opened their doors to three projects! Congratulations to the OpenCourse team, who are funded by NSF/NSDL monies. Our EduCommons project (funded by the Hewlett Foundation) won’t be ready for several months yet. It’s good to see good ideas being implemented all around. I know there’s at least one other group planning similar software…. In other news, OLS (our social software which wraps around OCW) will be opening in early April. Anyone interested in participating in testing during the next two weeks, please drop me an email (*not* a comment).
We’re currently voting on what should go into the draft license which will be launched as the public beta. We’d love your feedback - please leave comments with clear yeas or neas to the proposed license options below by 10:00 MST Friday. ...
Hot on the heels of news about Lessig, Stephen Downes has accepted our invitation to provide the opening keynote for the 16th annual Utah State Univeristy Instructional Technology Institute, ?Reusable media, social networks, and openness in education.? Remember, the conference dates are September 1-3, 2004. We’re hoping to see many of you there!
Planning is underway for the 16th annual Utah State Univeristy Instructional Technology Institute, “Reusable media, social networks, and openness in education.” As program chair, I’m very happy to announce that Larry Lessig will be the closing keynote for the conference which will run W-F, September 1-3, 2004. More information coming soon…