Open-Content

You probably know about Structured Blogging, a Wordpress plugin for easily creating human and machine readable posts of specific kinds. (This is a screenshot of the authoring interface.) You can see the results under my book reviews tag. What I want to know is this - why haven’t we created a Wordpress plugin for creating learning materials and presenting these as human and machine readable resources? Better yet, why stop with a simple authoring system like Wordpress+plugin, why don’t we put something like AFLAX on the front end? ...

Kurt Squire told me earlier today about U Wisc’s new minor in Games, Learning, and Society. Looks absolutely fabulous. Congratulations, Kurt! From this page I found Constance Steinkuehler’s course on Critical Education Practice on the Internet. Lots to read here…

I’m reproducing here some conversation between Steve Carson and myself from the UNESCO IIEP forum on open content. ...

Brett Shelton, who is now officially my partner-in-crime, recently had a great idea. I was standing in his door, and he was sitting down in his cozy chair, which is how we conduct most of our converastions. ...

Development as Freedom My rating: 5 out of 5 Absolutely masterful. Sen argues forcely that freedom is not only the primary end of development programs, but must also be the primary means for reaching this end. The implications of the argument are as profound as they are far reaching; another great book for instructional technologists looking to understand their place in the larger development world. Is freedom the primary end of education? Can it be the primary means? ...

My mom used to say, “I don’t think you could stand on the corner and hand out twenty dollar bills without making people angry.” There are multiple ways of viewing everything, but this isn’t the way I would have seen this development: Developing countries are rapidly increasing the number and quality of college graduates, generating a sea change in the relative education advantage that advanced countries have enjoyed over literally hundreds of years… “Given recent trends in primary education, the world economy may achieve near universal literacy within a generation,â€? says Gail D. Fosler. ...

I never thought I’d see a screencast in a screencast, but that is just what I got watching this fabulous presentation about using screencasts, podcasts, blogs, etc. in support of education. Any time you come away with brand new ideas about how to be a better teacher, more efficiently, you have to share…

So by now you’ve heard - Blackboard is buying WebCT, and in 18 months or so there will be one uberproduct. We all saw this coming, but still - wow. Why am I mad? Because the state of Utah just completed a bid process to license and buy support for an LMS to be used at all state schools. And after phone calls and emails with a company who will remain un-named (why do we protect the guilty?) who assured me they would put in a bid to install / configure / support Sakai for the state, today I heard that they never bothered submitting a bid. I could spit I’m so angry. I could have worked with any of a handful of companies to get this OSS solution in the competition, but I naively believed this vendor’s word that they would put in a bid. And now it’s all said and done, and Sakai wasn’t even in the mix. I actually threw something across the room today when I heard. ...

Several interesting thoughts about sustainability are making the rounds after our recent conference. I thought Kerry struck a particularly alarming chord: Eisenhower National Clearinghouse is a good example - once enc.org, home to a plethora of math-based lesson plans, tutorials, java applets, etc. - now a paid subscription site due to the end of NSF funding. Is this really the eventual end of opencourseware and other open education projects once Hewlett funding and other sources dry up? Do the resources disappear from those who can’t afford them (trans. those who need them most)? Saying things like “oh, the Internet Archive will still have them” is only helpful as long as people keep funding the archive. ...

So I’m sitting here in the annual Hewlett Foundation Open Education Grantees meeting thinking… what is the future of open education? Where is it going? I think there is only one answer: localization. ...