Open-Content

Hadn’t mentioned my new book project here yet, mostly because I didn’t want to be accused of talking up vaporware. However, the new learning objects book is well underway and it’s time to get more people involved than my students. The book is written as a series of conversations around a conference room table, and deals with the what I feel are the least understood / most important concepts in learning objects. Also, the book is being written on the OpenContent wiki, and I would encourage anyone interested to jump in and have a go and writing new dialogue - or if you’re seriously committed - writing in a new character. And now, the links: ...

In Stephen’s notes on Wenger’s ALT-C talk, Etienne makes this absolutely wonderful comment: It’s a shift, from learning being viewed as a (vertical) relation between a provider and a recipient, to a (horizontal) peer to peer relationship of negotiation of multual relevance. Best definition of meaningful learning I’ve heard in ages. I’ve often thought that if a teacher can’t “convince” a student they need to learn a certain “required” subject (i.e., if they can’t demonstrate the relevance of material so supposedly important it was put into the core curriculum), they should not be allowed to teach it. Period. Of course, when the curriculum and assessments are set by the federal government, there is no mutual negotiation of anything. “Open wide,” says the omniscient panel of PhDs….

This one was just too funny not to repost. Enjoy this conversation between a Microsoft recruiter and Eric Raymond (Founder and Emeritus President of the Open Source Initiative) in which M$ mistakenly makes Eric a job offer.

Enjoyed listening to Chuck Vest talk (mp3) about where education and open education are heading. Vest was the president of MIT when it conceived of and launched MIT OpenCourseWare.

Stephen Downes takes a look at my recent piece regarding CC license selection behavior and says “the data don’t support [Wiley’s] hypothesis” that the proportion of creators choosing the license is directly proportional to the rights reserved in the license." Toward the end of my paper I claim that: While WiSH holds up when licenses are aggregated according to the number of conditions comprising them, there appears to be very little support for WiSH at the grain size of individual licenses. ...

I’ve put up a new paper draft exploring the patterns in CC license selection behavior by users on Flickr. You can access it here: Understanding the CC License Selection Behavior of Flickr Users I’d love to hear what you think. I mean to clean it up for “formal publication” after I get your feedback…

Saw a very cool item today called the Freedom Toaster. Basically a kiosk that allows people to burn CDs and DVDs of OSS for free. Now, if only they would put up more info and the software they’re using so that *we* could build one… :)

At the request of list members, I am republishing part of the exchange on IT Forum between myself and Larry Lipsitz, and absolutely great guy who publishes Educational Technology Magazine. I’ll leave it to you to guess which voice I am. :) ...

It’s that time of year again! Last year’s Open Education Conference at USU was described by several as “the best conference I ever attended.” This year’s conference should be even better. Keynotes this year include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information) and Yochai Benkler (Coase’s Penguin). The Call for Papers is available now. Please submit something! General information on the conference, including a Flyer and Presentation Slide you can use to help us advertise, is available at http://cosl.usu.edu/conference/.

Lots of folks responded rather strongly to my suggestion that talking about and focusing on scalability is immoral. As usual, I appear to have done a poor job articulating my feelings. :) The focus on scalability scares me because it only focuses on reaching lots of people, on reaching large numbers of people, on reaching the majority of people. The amount of commitment necessary to reach all as opposed to many seems qualitatively different to me. I’m afraid that the focus on scaling, and talk about how great and worthy reaching the majority of people is, will allow instructional technologists to feel like they’re off the hook for reaching the few, the small numbers of people, the minority. ...