Last year I began having conversations with Utah public school educators about sharing their educational materials as open educational resources. The conversation generally went like this: Me: Would you be willing to share the lesson plans and other materials you create with others for them to reuse? Teacher: Sure! Me: Great! The best way to do that is by applying this Creative Commons license to your work. Teacher: A copyright license? ...
I appreciate the usefulness of open educational resources in supporting informal learning as much as anyone. I also care very deeply about the adoption and use of open educational resources in formal education settings. The kinds of things I lay awake at night worrying about differ depending on which of the two I’m thinking about when I go to bed. The more people I talk to, the more convinced I am that OER has failed to establish a digestible value proposition for formal education. For better or worse, many people caught up in the day-to-day vortex of teaching, advising, mentoring, and grading don’t have the spare time to problematize publisher-school power relations, realize the virtue of local control of curriculum materials, or fully appreciate the transformative benefits of transparency. ...
Two units at Brigham Young University have adopted open access policies - both the Harold B. Lee Library faculty and the faculty in my own department, Instructional Psychology and Technology, voted to adopt the policies earlier this month. IP&T’s policy was based on the HBLL policy, which was based on existing OA policies at other universities. I am giddy with excitement to see some of my own published articles beginning to appear in BYU’s institutional repository - they now have an open, permanent, curated home and I can link to them with confidence. And the whole world can and will be able to access and read them, legally, in perpetuity! This is the way science should work. ...
I’ve seen a lot of confusion on the interwebz lately about the meaning of the term open - like people linking to copyrighted videos posted illegally in YouTube as examples of OERs. Since I have a keen interest in people understanding the term “open content” the way I originally intended for them to, I will soon be adding a “definition” section to opencontent.org. (I think of the “open” in open educational resources the same way, though I neither have nor claim special authority to clarify its definition.) Here’s a first draft of what will appear there. Your feedback would be appreciated. (You may recognize some of this as material that has appeared on my blog in the past.) ...
A summary of the core argument of my recent keynote at the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (slides at http://slideshare.net/opencontent/). Throughout the late 20th century, and into the early 21st, when we spoke about “innovation” we largely meant impressive technical feats. Think Jobs and Woz creating the Mac, or Larry and Sergey creating Google, or the kinds of things Tony Hirst and Jim Groom seem to pull off regularly. We made heroes of the two geeks working in their mom’s garage… We made heroes of the lone coder, working late at night armed only with Emacs and Mountain Dew. These legends engaged in mythical man-versus-nature battles, subduing the wild frontier of source code and bending the Internet to their wills. They’re just plain cool. ...
I’ve written about this before, but here we go again… In educational research there is a long and storied history of people conducting studies along the lines of “is video-based instruction more effective than audio-based instruction?” or “is text-based instruction more effective than audio-based instruction?” or ““is video-based instruction more effective than text-based instruction?,” etc. This pointless family of research has a name, the “No Significant Difference Phenomenon,” and even has it’s own website: http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/. From the website: ...
Earlier this year I blogged about what I thought should go into an open textbook bill (with clarifications the next day). I’m extremely pleased that Senator Durbin has introduced a bill which closely resembles these recommendations and therefore, to my mind, is on exactly the right track. You can read Durbin’s remarks as he introduced the bill, and then study the full text of S. 1714 on GovTrack (where you can also subscribe to a feed of all bill-related activity). ...
I’ve always been impressed by the idea of the Large Hadron Collider. It’s an unthinkably expensive, large-scale experimental apparatus designed for the sole purpose of generating and collecting data. Why would countries spend so much money on data? Why would so many people dedicate the better part of their lives to a project like the LHC? Because the so-called “hard” sciences - fields like physics and astronomy - have made the remarkable progress they have in understanding the structure of matter and the nature of the universe because they really care about data. They care about data in a way that educators have a difficult time comprehending, let alone understanding. ...
Driving home from a meeting last week I heard a truly atrocious recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, one of my favorite pieces for orchestra. The conductor’s interpretation (or complete lack thereof) had me screaming at the radio and almost putting my head through the steering wheel on a couple of occasions. The best recording of this fabulous piece of music is, in my not so humble opinion, John Mauceri leading the London Symphony Orchestra - (previews available from Amazon at Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade). How does this relate to OCW, you ask? ...
The CBC has posted a great interview with Eric Frank of Flat World Knowledge about open textbooks. While an abbreviated version will run on the air, you can listen to (and download) the full, uncut interview online.