Open-Education

Lately I’ve been talking a lot with Bekir Gur (one of my absolutely excellent PhD students) about open education in the context of his dissertation writing. For his dissertation he’s taking a critical view of the field of instructional technology and, in the context of several reviews that range from the dominance of psychologism in the field to the the field’s obsession with objectification (remember the IEEE LOM documents saying people are learning objects?), he is arriving at an interesting conclusion: open education, thoughtfully practiced, is one solution to many of the ills currently plaguing the field of instructional technology. Reading his drafts and talking with him has prompted a few interesting thoughts… ...

As part of our recent application to establish a UNESCO Chair in Open Education at Utah State University, we’re creating an emphasis in Open Education in our PhD in Instructional Technology here. The emphasis is simply a sequence of electives that students will be able to choose from that will provide them with a stronger foundation in open education. I believe this will be something really special, and will help us attract even more passion and great talent into the department and the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, as well as enrolling students from outside our department. ...

Here’s a draft of a chapter I am writing for an upcoming book on open education. It’s (supposedly) written from some time decades in the future, and is part autobiography and part history. I’d love any feedback you have… ...

I am extremely pleased to announce that the Utah Legislature has provided $200,000 to Utah State University for OpenCourseWare-related activities in the 2007-2008 budget year. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first state or federal funding to be set aside anywhere in the US for opencourseware-like initiatives, and only the second governmental funding so allocated world-wide. The Dutch government provides partial funding for the Dutch Open University’s openER program (which also happens to use eduCommons). The Hewlett Foundation provides the rest of the funding for openER. ...

A great course for listening in on (or viewing!): InfoSys 296A-2 / Law276.8 Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information: Technical, Economic, Social, and Legal Perspectives | Fall 2006, from the Berkeley open educational resource collection.

Teemu and pals are engaged in a project they call MobilED that is developing mobile phone interfaces into repositories like MediaWiki. This is sooo cool… I see all kinds of overlaps with the things we’re doing, I just need to get them listed and prioritized so that I can talk to Teemu about collaborating somehow… =) Looks like he already has a great group of collaborators together. Can I just say again that I love being part of a community of really bright people who understand open sharing?

I recently finished a report on the sustainability of OER projects in higher education for the OECD. The report draws on papers written by Downes and Dholakai earlier this year (2006) for the February OECD meeting in Malmo. I wish I could claim that the report contains an earth-shattering revelation about how to make what we do “sustainable in the eyes of our home institutions.” This phrase, “sustainable in the eyes of our home institutions,” translates roughly into “our home institutions kindly allow us to continue working on our projects so long as funding for the project comes from an outside source.” Thinking we can find an infinite source of outside funding is silly, and so we have only one other choice, really - make the OER projects we do so central and critical to our institutions that they have no choice but to continue them once the outside funding goes away… ...

At the OCW Consortium meetings at the Open Education conference in September, I asked whether other OCWs had explicitly CC licensed their metadata. In talking to people then and since then, the general response is best characterized as hemming and hawing. Very folks appear to have considered this licensing status of their metadata. But this seems like a very clear issue to my very simple mind. I mean, what’s the point of creating open access materials if you’re going to hoard your metadata and make it hard for people to find the materials? (This same problem is what seems to have stymied the NSDL for a few years in the early 2000s.) ...

Linking to my article for the October / November issue of Innovate on openness in education. Check out the rest of the articles too… interesting issue.

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. ...