Cosl

Next Monday is the beginning of the Introduction to Open Education course! Hurray! We already have over 20 participants from major US instructional technology programs (Georgia, Indiana, George Mason, South Florida) and folks from six countries outside the US signed up to participate. I suppose the USU participants (my school) are all waiting for next week to sign up… =) I’ve had someone (who isn’t a university student, and therefore doesn’t need or want credits) ask about receiving a certificate from the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning for successful completion of the experience. So here is what I’m going to do (sorry about the detail, but if you ever want to do this at your university the detail may come in handy): ...

The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning has been diligently searching for a Research Fellow to work with us on empirical studies of when, where, and why some of the technologies we associate with web2.0 (like tagging, rating, annotating, and recommendor systems) work or don’t work. I’m am as happy as a clam to announce that thanks to the generous cooperation of UBC’s Michelle Lamberson, Director of Learning Technology, Brian Lamb has joined COSL as a Research Fellow. More details and amazing results to follow… Congrats, Brian! - or condolences, we’ll see which turn out to be most appropriate :)

Call for Papers Open Education 2007: Localizing and Learning Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University Conference dates are September 26-28, 2007 Submission deadline is May 18, 2007 Conference Themes For the first several years our field focused on content production and content licensing. Today, there are thousands of full university courses and tens of thousands of learning modules available as open educational resources under open licenses like those offered by Creative Commons. However, our work isn’t finished; we’re simply nearing a checkpoint. ...

I am extremely happy to announce that the program for Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content is online! The conference is being hosted by COSL with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and will be held at Utah State University in beautiful Logan Utah. Highlights this year will surely include Creative Commons General Counsel Mia Garlick answering the question “What is commercial use?.” The earth will possibly explode as Brian Lamb and Todd Richmond give talks at the same conference with the titles “DIY Educators Gone Wild: Where are the Instructional Mash-Ups?” and “Open Content: Must Anarchy Reign?” (hint: Todd will answer a resounding yes.) Representatives from UNESCO and OECD will be speaking; the Hewlett and Mellon Foundations, the main US funders behind open source in education, will be speaking. Presenters from a dozen or more countries will talk about everything from the technical bleeding-edge to the no tech zones of Nepal. And of course the major OCW projects from the US, EU, and Asia will be represented as well. It is going to be a rockin time for sure. You can check out the detailed program online, though it is subject to minor changes. ...