Open-Content

Here are my slides from the Dean’s Lecture at University of Saskatchawan on Thursday. Had a great crowd out for the talk and a great time giving it. Regular readers will recognize material in the second half of the talk, but the first half contains a photo-only version of the Trucker Tale followed by some historical analysis ranging from roughly 1000-1600. This new historical analysis looks at lessons learned by the early church in its struggle to control access to the scriptures. I’m still building and expanding this argument, but I think there are many useful things for publishers (who try to control access to research) and university faculty (who try to control access to teaching and learning materials) to learn from the church’s encounter with the people’s demand for information and a new technology called the printing press. Comments welcome. ...

BYU Independent Study (BYU IS) has launched its opencourseware pilot - http://ocw.byu.edu! University Courses Public Speaking (TMA 150) Personal Finance (BUSM 418) Cooking in the Home (SFL 110) High School Courses United States Government and Citizenship (GOVT 45) World Geography: The Forces That Shape Our World (GEOG 41) Earth Science, Part 1 (EARTH 41) The pilot includes three university-level courses and three high school-level courses (BYU IS offers 250 university-level courses online for credit and another 250 high school-level courses online for credit). The courses in BYU IS OCW are content-complete - that is, they are the full courses as delivered online without the need of additional textbooks or other materials (only graded assessments have been removed). ...

I recently reported the results of Sean Duncan’s dissertation, which calls into question the actual rates of reuse of open educational resources. A number of people have expressed concern or disbelief with his results. As a highlight, if you missed the earlier post, the study looked at rates of use, reuse, and adaptation within the Connexions collection, and found that of 5,221 modules published on the site only 3,519 of these were ever reused in a collection or adapted in any manner elsewhere on the site, and that only 15 modules were used, reused, or adapted more than five times. ...

A student of mine, now DOCTOR Sean Duncan (congrats again!) has posted his excellent dissertation studying reuse of OERs online under a CC-BY license. This was one of the most enjoyable dissertations I have ever chaired. I’ll cover highlights below, but I encourage you to check out the full text of Patterns of Learning Object Reuse in the Connexions Repository for yourself. The study examined patterns and amount of reuse within the Connexions OER repository at Rice. CNX seemed like a great choice for examining reuse because the system is built specifically to support both adapting individual modules and remixing individual modules into courses / collections. Importantly, through system metadata that CNX also makes openly available, all these relationships can be explored programatically in a straightforward way. So CNX is in many ways a best-case scenario for studying reuse, adaptation, and remixing. ...

Google Wave, which has excited so many lately, began with the question “what would email look like if it were invented today?” I love that question. Here is a similar one prompted from the conversation at #dml09ppp today. Scaling 100 years ago used different methods with different numeric goals from scaling today. Think about the difference between scaling a service to hundreds of people and scaling a service to hundreds of millions of people. So here’s the question - What would highly scalable learning look like if we invented it today (in the context of existing technologies) as opposed to the schools we invented centuries ago (in the context of the technologies available at the time)?

Even though I’m on vacation, things with the potential to completely transform the way we teach and learn come along so rarely I had to share. It’s called Google Wave. Check out Tim O’Reilly’s writeup, “What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?” and the Google Wave homepage.

I’ve just been named #78 on Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business list (David Wiley). In my wildest dreams I never imagined finding myself on a list with Hayao Miyazaki (Totoro), JJ Abrams (Lost), Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are), and Brian Eno (where to start?), and 95 other incredible people. I’m certainly not deserving, but I’m grateful for the recognition of my contribution and I hope that it brings greater awareness to the work we’re all doing on open education.

This year’s MASTER STUDY RESOLUTION for the 2009 General Session, a “joint resolution of the [Utah] Legislature [which] gives the Legislative Management Committee items of study it may assign to the appropriate interim committee” over the summer, includes something we have been hoping to see! Item 30 reads: 30. Educational Resources in the Public Domain - to study how curriculum materials and other learning resources created with state funds may be placed in the public domain. ...

About a year ago, I finished 2005-2012: The OpenCourseWars, and thought it quite a fun exercise to try to forecast where things are headed. A few months ago Trey called me a futurist, and I chuckled. Then the Deseret News called me Nostradamus, and I cringed. Perhaps I let what others say about me influence me too much, but I have been spending more and more time thinking about the future of the movement. ...

Stephen recently suggested that the two of us sit down for a day-long conversation. I thought it was a brilliant idea. So on August 11, as a pre-conference event at this year’s Open Education 2009 in Vancouver, Stephen and I will sit down for a full day of conversation about anything and everything open education. We’ll open the conversation to the public, but this will be a serious conversation - don’t come looking for pot-shots and cheap one-liners. We’ll be transcribing the day’s conversation and publishing it as a book afterward. ...