Open-Education

Seth Godin expands on Kevin Kelley’s Better than Free. Seth’s takeaway: “when there are infinite copies of something, charging for one is almost impossible.” Or in Kevin’s words, When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. They both hit the nail right on the head. People trying to figure out how to make open education sustainable would do well to read these articles. If a day or two passes and someone hasn’t translated Kevin’s eight points into education speak I’ll go ahead and do it. But read these pieces NOW.

Via eSchoolNews comes the exciting news that Florida public schools have added a CC-licensed resource to their approved list of curricular materials: Tired of investing in expensive textbooks and proprietary software programs, Florida education officials are looking to an open online-learning platform to teach young students basic reading skills… Florida has adopted FreeReading.net on its short list of K-3 supplemental reading programs that schools may use state instructional money to purchase for the 2008-09 school year. This is the first open instructional program to be approved through an official state adoption, officials said. ...

Alessandro blogged tonight about the same frustration many of us (myself included) are feeling with regard to the Intro to Open Ed course. Alessandro’s frustrated that I haven’t been providing as much feedback as might be desired. I have to agree. With about 60 students following the course, I could easily spend all day every day responding to what you are all writing and still not keep up. There is really amazing thinking and writing happening “out there,” and I love reading it and engaging with it. As you may guess, though, I’m making sure to give feedback and additional prompts to the students who are registered for credit first, and then reading as much of the rest of your work when I can, and commenting when possible. ...

I love Stephen Downes. Even though I can’t understand what he’s been saying to me for the last year, he still pushes me around mentally and makes me think and write. You simply have to love someone who does that for you. Commenting on Jennifer’s blog, Stephen asks: ...

I’m at an incredible meeting co-sponsored by Shuttleworth, Hewlett, and OSI looking at possibly producing a declaration on open education. For the first session in the morning, participants listed all the open education projects we are working on. You can see the cards we posted on the windows, or the list of projects as we transcribed it into the wiki. We then broke into small groups and analyzed the data from the cards. My group decided to treat each card as if it were a webpage we were tagging in delicious. You can see the resulting collection of tags as a tag cloud, a pie chart, and a bar chart. These data visualizations are an interesting commentary on where the open education movement is spending its efforts. We then gathered back together and reported the work of our small groups.

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): ...

I have posted the first draft of the syllabus for my fall course, called Introduction to Open Education. I would absolutely love your feedback on important literature I’ve missed (especially your own papers!), topics that you think deserve their own dedicated week’s worth of time, etc. Feel free to either edit the syllabus directly or to use the discussion tab at the top of the page. I’m also very happy to say that this class will be completely online, run completely in the open, and is welcome to all comers. If you would like to take the course for credit, just sign up for an independent study at your university and find a supervising faculty member to whom I can send a grade at the end of term. Be sure to contact me directly to let me know you’re taking the course for credit and send contact info for your supervising faculty member. Then add your info to the syllabus as directed (Name :: School :: Email :: Blog) so the rest of us can find you. ...

Preparing for my out-of-body presentation in Taiwan this week (I’m at home sick - grrr), I kept thinking about the OER space until I actually started visualizing it as a kind of outer space, with little OER bits floating around aimlessly. It was pretty fun to think about until I realized that the primoridal OER soup, the “OER Nebula” is actually being pulled in several directions by several different sources of gravity: ...

There’s a fascinating interview on Spiegel with James Shikwati, an “African economics expert,” in which he explains how foreign aid is preventing many African nations from rising out of poverty and the host of other problems they face. “If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid…. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.” ...

No, this isn’t another tired post complaining that we should think of all “consumers” as also being “producers.” Of course we should. This is a post about a much more subtle problem with the way we’re thinking, that I am increasingly convinced is putting the field of open educational resources (OER) at risk. ...