Shuttleworth

[caption id=“attachment_3244” align=“alignright” width=“300”] via MIke Caulfield[/caption] I recently received the excellent news that I will receive another year of support as a Shuttleworth Fellow. These fellowships are extremely generous and I’m incredibly grateful for the foundation’s vote of confidence in the work I’m doing supporting widespread OER adoption through Lumen Learning. As many of you know, Shuttleworth Fellows also have the opportunity to pitch the Foundation for project funding. The foundation has also chosen to support our project proposal this year, and I’m extremely excited to start sharing the idea we’re working on with the community. ...

Long before an upstart Harry headed to Hogwarts, Sparrowhawk went to the School of Roke in Ursula K. Leguin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. As part of his schooling, Sparrowhawk: was sent with seven other boys across Roke Island to the farthest north-most cape, where stands the Isolate Tower. There by himself lived the Master Namer, who was called by a name that had no meaning in any language, Kurremkarmerruk. No farm or dwelling lay within miles of the tower. Grim it stood above the northern cliffs, grey were the clouds over the seas of winter, endless the lists and ranks and rounds of names that the Namer’s eight pupils must learn. Amongst them in the tower’s high room Kurremkarmerruk sat on the high seat, writing down lists of names that must be learned before the ink faded at midnight leaving the parchment blank again. ...

I recently needed to quickly create a map of higher education institutions Lumen is working with, and consequently needed LAT and LONG info for dozens of schools. Rather than do that all by hand, I created this little recipe for automatically retrieving coordinates given a school’s name using the Google Maps API and Google Spreadsheets. Here’s a demonstration of the recipe using a list of all the higher education institutions where I’ve taught: ...

I’m currently in Edinburgh at the semi-annual Shuttleworth Foundation Gathering. One of the other Fellows, Dan Whaley, is working on a killer open source annotation and highlighting tool called Hypothesis. You should absolutely check it out. I’ve enabled Hypothesis on my blog now (via the companion Wordpress plugin!). If you want to make comments on specific words or phrases in my posts (instead of making a comment on the entire post), just highlight a word or phrase and then click on the pen icon that pops up. I’ll be keen to see what - if anything - you do with this new capability. Please annotate posts on their permalink pages rather than annotating them on the front page. ...

This month is the one year anniversary of Lumen Learning, the “RedHat for OER” I founded with Kim Thanos in October, 2012. It’s been an incredible first year, and we’ve learned a million lessons along the way - and we continue to learn more about what it takes to support OER adoption at scale every day. We’ve pulled together a summary of what’s happening with our post-secondary work for fall semester 2013 in a press release posted on the Lumen site, which begins: ...

One of the many benefits of my Shuttleworth Fellowship is getting to hang out with other Shuttleworth Fellows twice a year at a meeting called The Gathering. They are an insanely bright, motivated, talented group of people. Take, for example, Marcin Jakubowski who is building the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), “an open technological platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts.” I’m still a little in awe of the scope of work he has taken on… ...

I’ve been fairly quiet recently about Lumen Learning, the “RedHat for OER” I founded earlier this year with Kim Thanos. Lumen (for short) is where I’m spending my Shuttleworth Fellowship time, with the goal of drastically increasing the use of OER in formal educational settings in order to lower the cost and improve the quality of education. Today Lumen released its first six Open Course Frameworks. Open Course Frameworks are an idea I am very excited about, because they greatly simplify the process of adopting OER for the average teacher or institution. Open Course Frameworks are: ...

Last week I wrote about the many goals I have for the open education movement, and how a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation is enabling me to spend focused time pursuing them. While I tried to lay out a compelling vision of what I want to accomplish last week, I didn’t discuss the how. Clearly, accomplishing a set of goals of that scope and magnitude requires more energy and productive capacity than any one person could ever muster. ...

Sometimes it helps to look backwards and figure out where you’ve been to get a clearer picture of where you’re going. As today is the first official day of my Shuttleworth Fellowship, I’ve been taking the opportunity to reflect on where I’ve come from and where I’m going. Upon reflection, it feels like I have some really strong momentum behind my work in open education. But where is that momentum carrying me? How can I leverage it thoughtfully to be more useful? (This thinking fortuitously coincides with a recent article titled Why Open Educational Resources Have Not Noticeably Affected Higher Education to which I have included a paragraph response to below. Spolier alert: we see the world very differently.) ...

There are some very exciting things happening in my life right now. 1. I’m extremely humbled and excited to have been awarded a Shuttleworth Fellowship. These Fellowships provide a year’s salary replacement, allowing each Fellow to focus completely on creating a particular kind of social change - without other distractions. In my application, I characterized the change I want to create this way: I want to push the field over the tipping point and create a world where OER are used pervasively throughout secondary schools, community colleges, and universities. In my vision of the world, OER supplant traditional textbooks for all high school, associates degree, and undergraduate general education courses. Organizations, faculty, and students at all three levels collaborate to create and improve an openly licensed content infrastructure that dramatically reduces the cost of education, increases student success, and supports rapid experimentation and innovation. ...