Open-Content

Today and tomorrow I’m at the EdTech Efficacy Research Academic Symposium in Washington, DC. The conversations here have been wonderful and have reminded me of something… For many years, several friends and I have argued about the following question: After accounting for all other differences - differences in a student’s age, race, gender, income, and prior academic success; differences in school environments; differences in teachers; differences in support available from friends, family, and other out-of-school sources; &c. - what is the theoretical upper limit on the impact a specific textbook, digital learning platform, or other edtech product can have on educational measures we care about (e.g., final grade, completion rate, time to graduation, satisfaction, etc.)? ...

Over the last several weeks there has been an incredible amount of writing about open pedagogy and open educational practices (samples collected here by Maha). There have been dozens of blog posts. Countless tweets. There was a well-attended (and well-viewed) conversation via Google Hangout. At the Hewlett OER Meeting last week over a dozen people spent another hour talking about the issue during the unconference time. There were additional conversations on the topic during walks through the incredibly beautiful countryside outside Toronto. I had particularly helpful talks with John Hilton and Rajiv Jhangiani - but don’t blame them if you don’t like what you read below. ...

Some random thoughts emerging in my mind as a result of yesterday’s wonderful conversation on “open pedagogy.” Don’t work too hard to figure out how they’re supposed to connect up. What we do with tools and resources is more important than the tools and resources themselves. However, without tools and resources there is precious little we can do. Many (e.g., Vygotsky, Leont’ev, Wertsch) have argued persuasively that learning is mediated. Some have argued (again, I think persuasively) that the primary tool that mediates learning is language. Whether learning is being supported through conversation, lecture, argument, video, adaptive courseware, plain old textbook, or Google Hangout, words are absolutely critical to supporting learning. ...

In my recent post How is Open Pedagogy Different?, I defined open pedagogy as ”the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions” - a definition I have been using in my writing and public speaking since I first blogged about open pedagogy back in 2013 (except there were only 4Rs back then). Although none of my other posts or talks on this topic over the past four years managed to, How is Open Pedagogy Different? elicited quite a response. Many of these responses were deeply interesting and informative. For example, I learned that when I first started writing about open pedagogy in 2013, I made the cardinal mistake of not checking to see if the term might have a long history of use by others in a context completely outside the one I was writing about. It does. Oops. However, this is not actually what led to the strong reaction to my post. ...

A quick search via Google shows that Stephen Downes is mentioned over 500 times on the pages of Iterating Toward Openness. What would I do without him to disagree and argue with? I would certainly be intellectually impoverished. As I’ve said before, everyone needs a Stephen in their life. Anyway, here’s another page to add to the pile… In commenting on the recent announcement about the partnership between Follett and Lumen, Stephen asks: ...

In 2012 Kim Thanos and I founded Lumen Learning because, through our Gates-funded work on the Kaleidoscope Project, we had seen first-hand how hard it was for faculty to replace publisher materials with OER. The 2000s were an inspiring decade as institutions and individuals created and published a huge amount of openly licensed educational materials (e.g., MIT OCW, Wikipedia, Khan Academy), but in 2010 it was difficult to find a faculty member who had made the switch. It seemed like lots of people wanted to publish and share their own OER, but no one wanted to use anyone else’s. ...

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“640”] This image from the BBC is not subject to opencontent.org’s Creative Commons license.[/caption] And now for something completely different… I’m taking a pause from talking directly about open for a moment to share some resources I’ve recently found that have made my data life much more efficient and enjoyable. But don’t worry - there’s still a connection to open. I spend a lot of my time working in the data generated by use of Lumen’s open courseware. In addition to regular meetings with partner schools where we share insights both surprising and mundane, this work also supports our continuous improvement efforts to make our open courseware objectively more effective term after term. As I’ve said many times: ...

UPDATE: For my latest thinking on open pedagogy, see the post When Opens Collide. The post below will remain here for archival purposes. I feel like words should mean something. Especially the word “open.” Specifically, I’m deeply concerned about the way many have begun using “open” in the context of “open pedagogy,” because I can’t tell what it means. For many years we have seen openwashing among companies working in the education space, in which they either knowingly or accidentally attempt to equate “open” with something other than a free grant of the 5R permissions. If left unchecked, these attempts would dilute and weaken the meaning of open and, consequently, the community rallies against them. ...

In a recent interview, Pearson CEO John Fallon said: “Education like every other sector and sphere of life is going through this digital transformation. There is going to be a big winner in the transformation in education. We are absolutely determined to make Pearson that winner.” This is perhaps the clearest statement I’ve ever read of the fundamentally wrongheaded view of the traditional publishers. The only way to survive “this digital transformation” is to be absolutely determined to make learners the big winners. Only the organizations that make this commitment a core value will remain standing when all is said and done.

Dumping out some thoughts here so I can return to them when I have more time. There’s been some fabulous writing over the last month or so about whether or not open licensing is important to open pedagogy, beginning with Clint Lalonde’s Does Open Pedagogy Require OER? (read the comments, too). Reading this has prompted me to do some additional thinking which is helping me clarify what I mean by “open pedagogy.” I realize there are people who use the term “open pedagogy” in different ways than I do, and even some who are actively advocating for it to be defined in different ways (e.g., Hegarty, 2015). That’s fine. My goal here is to bring greater clarity to my own thinking. ...