Ocw

There’s something about the notion of reuse that seems to confuse people. They think “reusable resources” like those in an OpenCourseWare collection should “just work out of the box.” We frequently hear about “design tips” for making learning objects more reusable; what we almost never hear about is “design tips” for how to reuse existing materials. It seems to me that the all-time best example of reuse, the one that all instructional designers should study as a case, and consequently the one about which I am writing a longer piece now, is The Magnificent Seven. This film was, of course, a remake of Kurosawa’s Shichinin no Samurai. Perhaps we (instructional designers) should all be talking about “remaking” learning objects, and not “reusing” them, in order to better communicate the complicated process involved in taking a cultural artifact developed by another person for another audience and trying to make it speak meaningfully to our audience. ...

Our annual conference (which several of you attended last year, thanks!) is back. Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education will take place September 28 - 30, 2005 in beautiful Logan, Utah. I’m *really* excited about the conference this year. A few highlights: Keynote speakers include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information, etc.) and Yochai Benkler (Coase’s Penguin, etc.) and one other (but we can’t say who yet). The Hewlett Foundation will be holding its annual open education fundees meeting in conjunction with the conference, which will bring several super interesting participants to the conference Finally, the group of universities that recently met at MIT to discuss their OpenCourseWare projects will be meeting again in conjunction with the conference, which will bring even more people doing really excellent open education work I’ll be able to say more later, but this is going to be an absolutely awesome conference. I hope you come! More details are available on the conference website. Registration isn’t open yet, but I’m so excited I just had to share…

Well, the new theme has been checked in (as have a host of backend authoring improvements to eduCommons itself), the collection has been moved onto the cluster, and Squid is caching happily away. USU OCW is now in the state it will be in for our formal launch. Come by and have a look if you still haven’t. We’d love your feedback.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out Johns Hopkins School of Public Health OpenCourseWare. This in addition to OpenCourseWare-esque projects at Utah State University, MIT, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, and Foothill De-Anza.

We haven’t officially launched the site yet, but the first eight courses in USU OpenCourseWare are now available. The official announcement will come after we clean a few non-course related things up (like the design of the front page). But I thought folks would like to know as soon as these courses became available…

A story in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education (paid registration required, ironically enough) discusses the growing momentum behind the OpenCourseWare movement, and the meeting at MIT two weeks ago. As described in the article, at this meeting several universities at varying levels of progress into their OCWs met to talk about best practices, building additional momentum behind the movement, etc. Attendees included reps from MIT, Utah State University, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Tufts, Michigan, the Universia consortium, the China Open Resources for Education consortium, and a new consortium of Japanese schools. Some other “name” schools who are dipping their toes in the pool were there are well. It’s nice to see the mainstream press following what we’re doing, even if they don’t completely “get it” yet.