Open-Content

So far the response to the redesign of the Introduction to Open Education course has been great (already coverage in the Chronicle and the syllabus has been online less than a week). There’s been good critical feedback as well; the newly revised syllabus has a completely revamped Grading section based on Lynn Taylor’s comments (for those of you who don’t know Lynn, he’s the Director of the Open High School of Utah and you’ll be getting to know him well in the years to come). ...

President-elect Obama’s Change.gov website has formally adopted the Creative Commons Attribution license as it’s standard copyright license for the site. High marks for President-elect Obama on this! Now, if we can just get Lessig appointed as Copyright Czar we’ll have a prayer of seeing real copyright reform during the next administration.

Chris Lott’s recent post Open Content is So, Like, Yesterday has earned him Stephen’s attention and misinterpretation. Well, that’s happened to many of us. =) I want to remix a little of his post and provide some supporting comments: Good open content is a vital part of creating a vital open education apparatus… Content is just one piece of the open education mosaic that is worth a lot less on its own than in concert with practices, context, artifacts. ...

Winter semester I’m teaching a new version of the Introduction to Open Education course here at BYU. I’m as excited for this course as I’ve ever been for any - partly because the course has been completely redesigned as a massively multiplayer role-playing game. From the Syllabus: Instructional design faculty are frequently criticized for delivering information about innovative new pedagogical methods to their students in the form of traditional lectures - for talking the talk but failing to walking the walk. Setting positive examples is important for people in every field to do. ...

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about aspects of openness we’ve discussed less in the past - like accreditation issues. The discussion has been interesting and useful, so John and I have arranged with Terry to do a special issue of IRRODL on the topic of Openness and the Future of Higher Education. Information below. I would HIGHLY encourage you all to send something in… Call for Papers - Openness and the Future of Higher Education ...

My invited talk today went pretty well. Here are the slides from the presentation… Openness and the Disaggregated Future of Higher Education View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: elearn open)

Keynoting a SBIE conference in Fortaleza, Brazil, I met a woman who coordinated the translation of almost half of the Instructional Use of Learning Objects into Portuguese. I love open licenses!

Champions of personalized instruction tend to fall back on the assumption that one-on-one tutoring is the most effective instructional approach but is not scalable (implicit in Bloom’s two sigma problem), and since “we all know” that group instruction is poor, we’ve no choice but to personalize using an automated computer system as our best and most effective path forward. Now, if you’ve ever taught, you know that many students love to talk. It seems that they live to ask questions, argue, and endlessly discuss. Now, I ask you: How can removing all possibility of engaging in their favorite approach to learning (by making the computer the only entity with whom they can interact) be said to be personalization for them? ...

If only all first releases were as good as these… Mark Horner’s Free High School Science Texts has released version 0 of its materials. Wow! I think I know what the Open High School will be using when we open next year! Hopefully Mark and his team will choose to migrate the license from the GFDL to CC By-SA now that the new version of the GFDL has made this possible. Otherwise remixing these materials is going to be a nightmare. Even if they become CC By-SA it will still be nigh unto impossible thanks to incompatibilities amongst CC’s own licenses (esp. CC By-SA and CC By-NC-SA). But we shall overcome… ...

I love the fact that there are so many people out there (you!) who are willing to share. This latest bit of love is directed at Scott for his absolutely brilliant (and exquisitely well-timed, for me) essay Planning to Share versus Just Sharing. The headings give you a taste for this classic compare and contrast piece juxtaposing our individuals’ sharing practices with those of institutions: - We grow our network by sharing, they start their network by setting up initial agreements. - We share what we share, they want to share what they often don’t have (or even really want). - We share with people, they share with “Institutions.” - We develop multiple (informal) channels while they focus on a single official mechanism. ...